WordPress Hosted vs Self Hosted

There are 2 Flavours of Word­Press. WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

At WordPress.com you can go and signup for a free word­press blog which will be hosted with Word­Press. Typ­i­cally you will get a blog address that is some­thing like yourblog.wordpress.com there are paid options that allow you to use your own domain name also.

The ver­sion of Word­Press at WordPress.org is the open source ver­sion of the same soft­ware that pow­ers WordPress.com, how­ever with this ver­sion you get much more flex­i­bil­ity in terms of extend­ing the plat­form with var­i­ous Plu­g­ins and Themes, fur­ther­more you are able to com­pletely cus­tomise the code if more advanced func­tion­al­ity is required.

More expla­na­tion of the dif­fer­ences between the 2 can be found here http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/