Coping Up With The Transition: From a Free-Hosted Blog To a Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog
Written by nick on May 8, 2008 – 12:30 am - 111 viewsAs a blogger that came from a free hosted blog, the transition of transferring from a blogger.com blog to my own self hosted wordpress blog was a very terrible experience. It was really frightening at first because of the unfamiliarity that the transition brings, what makes it very frustrating during those times is that I can’t find any help, oh, I found one, but guess what he told me. “I only offer blog setup for people who have signed up for hosting through my links”, wow, that’s really sweet. So what happened is I kept the struggles by myself, and learn things the hard way..
Anyways, it took almost three days for me to finally get the grasp of installing wordpress in my own domain. It wasn’t that hard actually, but for first timers, it’s not that easy also. Because of that experience, I thought of sharing a simple guide before you host your own domain and take that uncertain transition.
- Before making a purchase of your own domain and web host, utilize the services of free web hosting companies to get a preview of what you are about to face. I recommend using the one that I’m currently using, visit this free web host. Register for a subdomain account, don’t worry, it’s free. From there, you can have a first glance of how a control panel of a web host company will look like.
- On your free web host account page, navigate and click the control panel link of your registered subdomain account, it will further lead you to the control panel page. Then look for the Fantastico Deluxe icon and click on it. On the Fantatico Deluxe page, choose wordpress and follow the succeeding instructions, and presto! You have your wordpress account setup.. I told you it was very easy.
Okay, just in case you are using a different free web host and it have no Fantastico Deluxe function, please follow the procedures below.
- What you need to do first is to download the latest version of wordpress. Download it here.
- In your webhosts control panel, select MySQL database ( the one with the blue dolphin logo). From there, create a database, then create a database user. After that, proceed to “Add Users to Your Databases” and find the privileges checkbox and put a check in the “ALL” selection (I believe it is located at the left side of that column), then click “Add user to database” to confirm.
- Back to your downloaded wordpress files. After you have unzipped the file, open the file wp-config-sample.php, open it in your text editor (notepad or worpad will do), fill in your database details (now use the database username and password that you have created earlier), and save it as wp-config.php. Don’t forget this last part.
- Now open your FTP client and open your domain’s FTP account (if you don’t have one, download it for free here). **Remember that you still have to create an FTP account in your webhost’s control panel. You can do that by accessing the FTP manager**
- Upload all the files from your wordpress folder (only the files inside it, not the single wordpress folder itself) to the public_html directory.
- Off you go. Just open your domain’s url, http://yoursite.com, then follow the necessary steps to finish the installation.
What’s important here is you know where you will upload your files, in this case, the public_html directory. From that directory also, you can upload your wp themes and your wp plugins…
I hope this helps. Don’t hesitate to ask me questions by using the comment form below.. Good Luck!!
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