How to Set up a WordPress Website

This simple guide will show you how to set up a WordPress site in a few minutes.

Setting up a website has 3 parts:
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1. Buy Domain
2. Set up Hosting
3. Setup WordPress

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Buy a domain

I typically buy all my domains at Namecheap. because they’ve always been cheaper ($8) by a few dollars and if you buy a lot it makes a big difference. That being said, you may want to buy your domain and hosting from the same company, Hostgator ($13) to skip a few steps.

Step 2: Set up hosting

I’d recommend Hostgator for total newbies but DigitalOcean (with Forge to manage it) if you have any technical skill.

I’ve used namecheap, wpengine, godaddy, and hostgator, and hostgator has the best uptime and pricing that I’ve seen.

I started out with Namecheap at maybe $4 a month, and Hostgator is a little more than that.

You want the most basic shared hosting possible. Good news is they are on sale right now. So you can do monthly or yearly whatever you want to pay for. When I started I did monthly. If you aren’t familiar hosting has a few flavors:

  • shared hosting: a bunch of websites on the same box with a shared IP and shared resources. Works fine in the beginning but will crash with a lot of traffic.
  • VPS (Virtual Private Server): more advanced virtual allocation of resources for your website. What I have for my main biz.
  • Dedicated – your own box. Reserved when you need serious guarantee on uptime (I will get this soon I think).

The best part about Hostgator is tech support: jump on the phone with them anytime and they’ll walk you through anything.

Once you have hosting set up you need to point your domain at your hosting account.

For example, buy a domain on Namecheap you have to tell Namecheap that the hosting servers (the actual hardware) is over at Hostgator. Easy to do, just log into Namecheap and update a few settings:

If you keep both the domain and the hosting on Hostgator, check out this video to set things up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpHifkB2RqY

Step 3: Installing WordPress

Here are the instructions to install WordPress on Hostgator.

Most hosting accounts use a web application called CPANEL, which is just a user interface for mucking around with stuff like this.

This is simple to install. The next part is setting up the theme and simple shit and I can walk you through that too.

Additional resources:
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The two best articles on this are: