Hosting:
In selecting a self-hosted wordpress solution, the first step is to have a hosting service. I’ve used a few hosts in the past and I recommend the following:
Interserver.net* – THIS IS WHERE MY WEBSITES ARE HOSTED. I really love Interserver.net right now. Their customer support is extremely responsive, and their servers are really fast. My initial page load times went from about 8-10 seconds (at hostgator) to under 2 seconds here at interserver.net. Unlimited domains at around $5 per month.
GreenGeeks.com* – They claim to be 300% wind powered, which is important to me. I have some friends on their servers and it works well.
ASmallOrange.com* – This is a smaller company with a family feel I used to have my hosting with them and moved to Hostgator. A Small Orange is great. But for me with many domain names, it was getting expensive at A Small Orange. If you are only planning on a single domain or maybe a couple of domains, this is a great place to have your services.
HostGator.com* – This is where this site (and 10 of my other sites) are hosted. It’s only about $4 per month for 1 website domain, or I pay $6.36 per month for unlimited domains (on a 3 year plan). It works, and it’s cheap. They also buy wind energy credits, which is important to me. They claim that they are 130% wind powered. I no longer recommend HostGator. Their customer support has gone downhill quite a bit in the 3 years that I was there.
Hosting is a place where you can run the WordPress software. It allows WordPress to display webpages on other people’s computers. There are many, many websites running wordpress and many, many servers to run them. When you get a hosting account some other provider, they basically provide a computer that is running web server software. You can load virtually anything you want on it and have that displayed to the world.
Starting Your Own Blog Resources:
Here are a few pages of how to start your own blog. I originally had this in 3 parts, but decided it would be better broken down to more specific steps. I’ve also added a few other resources pages, such as camera and lighting pages, as well as general technology pages. These pages are most of the general steps in starting your own blog.
WordPress Pages
| WP Part 1 – Domain Names | WP Part 2 – Hosting | WP Part 3 – WordPress (installation) |
| WP Part 4 – Configure WP | WP Part 5 – Themes | WP Part 6 – Plugins |
| WP Part 7 – Widgets | WP Part 8 – Pages and Menus | WP Part 9 – Posts and Categories |
**DISCLAIMER: THERE MAY BE AFFILIATE LINKS ON THESE PAGES. If you buy from these vendors, I earn a small commission from them. Please support me by purchase with these links.
