Free?

There are two answers here: One, the WordPress.org software that you install on your own hosting platform is free and open-source, licensed under GPL and providing the "Four Freedoms" of GPL: - The freedom to run the program, for any purpose. - The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. - The freedom to redistribute. - The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. Additionally, these four freedoms extend to most plugins and themes, as most are also licensed under GPL, though in some cases GPL only applies to the code and not the additional media included with the theme or plugin. When you buy a "premium" theme or plugin that is GPL licensed, you are paying for access to an update server and a support agreement, not the software itself. These support agreements and automatic updates are worth the cost of admission, so support your plugin and theme authors! Two, there are a number of options for hosting. If you are hosting with WordPress.com, this is a hosting platform provided by Automattic and is not administered by the WordPress Foundation, though the software is the same. This hosted WordPress solution is perfect for small blogs that don't require the level of customization available when using the WordPress.org distribution of WordPress. Basic hosting without domain mapping (where your .com address maps to their servers) is free, though they do offer premium plans that include additional features. WordPress.com also offers WordPress VIP hosting, which is enterprise level hosting for very large sites and carries an appropriately large price tag. There are also a number of hosting companies that will do the hard work of administering a server for you through Managed WordPress hosting. There are a variety of differences between these companies, and I'd encourage you to take a look at their features and pricing and trying them out. Most of these plans include performance-tuned hosting environments with regular backups and support if your site has an issue. Many include scalability so that if you make the front page of Digg, Reddit or TechCrunch, for example, your site doesn't go down in flames. Managing a server is a lot of work, so that is where the value for these hosting plans comes from. You can also host WordPress yourself on a cloud-based container from a company like Digital Ocean, Linode, Google or Amazon. This provides you with a lower cost, since you are administering the server yourself, but requires a lot more work, since you are administering the server yourself! Personally, I've determined that the cost savings from self-hosting WordPress on a cloud container is not worth the additional time it would take to administer the server, so I use Managed WordPress hosting from a couple of companies, WP Engine and Pantheon, depending on the site requirements.

from my experience, by free they essentially mean that at the end of your site you will have .wordpress.com. you are also limited to the themes you can upload and edit, however it does come down to what it is you want from your site. if you are using it purely from a personal blogging side of things then the free version works perfectly, however if your site is more commercial then you way invest in buying the domain name and you can either host it on wordpress or take it to another hosting company