Starting a Self Hosted WordPress Blog: What You Need to Know

January 14, 2011 by Garen
Filed under: Website Talk, Wordpress and Blogging

( The Best Web Hosting Service )- If you’re entertaining the idea of having your very own blog, or perhaps even thinking of initiating a blogging business that would generate income, chances are you’ve already done some research and have come across WordPress blog. You must also be aware that there are two types of blogs being hosted on WordPress: one is being hosted as a WordPress.com sub-domain, and the other is that which is hosted under your own domain name. This article is going to discuss the latter. First, let’s talk about the advantage of having a self hosted WordPress blog rather than being hosted by WordPress.com – or some other blogging services, for that matter.

It might not mean that much at the beginning or you wouldn’t notice it, but after a certain period, your blog will mean so much to you, that‘s for sure. Perhaps because you want business visibility and exposure; maybe you just want to strengthen your online presence; or probably because of the revenues (read money) it bring. No matter what the motivating factors are, you want to be totally on top of things when it comes to your blog, of course.

But that’s not the case when you’re hosting your blog with other blogging services (blog.com, blogger.com, weebly.com); they are actually in control and they can do certain things that can put your valuable effort at risk, such as being mistakenly deleted by automatic spam detection or its firewall; or getting you banned for whatever reason. You may be able to restore your blog in a couple of days or longer, but not after you’ve probably lost tons of visitors, a good number of proposals, substantial search engine traffic, and may have jeopardized your search engine ranking.

You are not allowed full control of certain features, either; you can’t edit templates, install plug-ins; or add any dynamic features that you want for your blog. You can only have total control of these features in self-hosted blog. Perhaps it’s about time you get one. Now for the more interesting part of this article – and that is to show you how to create your self-hosted blog.

The two most important things you need to start your self-hosted blog are your domain name and web space where you can store your blog data. (see choosing a domain name) It’s a smarter move to purchase both from the same blog hosting provider, so you won’t need to configure your domain with your web space; thus, save time and effort. After you purchased the plan, you only have to wait for the log in details of the control panel and FTP account and of your hosting plan, which are provided by the hosting company.

If you purchased a cPanel hosting account, it comes with the built-in script installer Fantastico Deluxe, a one-click installation tool that you can use to install WordPress on your domain; all very simple and hassle-free. However, if you have a different control panel and it doesn’t have this type of installer, you can install WordPress manually. Here’s how:

•   Download the latest version of WordPress from the site www.wordpress.org/download/.
•   Extract it from your computer directory; then upload it to your FTP account using FTP client such as Filezill.
•   With the help of the control panel wizard, create MySQL database, establish database user and provide complete database privileges to that user. The process may vary according to the type of control panel; if you’re unfamiliar with the one that comes with your hosting account, you may seek assistance from customer support, as well.
•   When you’re done uploading the WordPress files to FTP and after you’ve created the database user, access your domain name on the Internet browser and begin the installation process.
•   You can access installation instruction both for beginners and advanced users at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

That’s it; you are now ready to start blogging on your self-hosted WordPress blog! Being in full control of your own blog, you can definitely explore a lot of possibilities. If you are serious about hosting your own blog I highly recommend you check out this article on “the best blog host“.

**Web Hosting Reviews**
What makes me different from the other million web hosting review sites, you see floating around the net is I actually check with the Better Business Bureau and rate each service on four other important areas; reliability, server speed, customer service, and cost. Please look over my full list of web hosting reviews by viewing the root site.