WordPress Beginners Series: Setting up a host

There are a lot of places where you can have a WordPress Site hosted. I use WordPress as a tool for my students to use in several of the classes I teach in the BS in Digital Marketing Technology at UW-Stout. The main reason I am creating this WordPress Beginners Series is to provide very quick and to the point tutorials for specific tasks that are common for WordPress Beginners and for my students.

There are plenty of places out on the Web where you can learn about WordPress. For instance this article is one I used to help me compare the WordPress hosting options. To be frank, there is a lot to think about when you are choosing a host. Perhaps the most important is to look forward to how you will be using the site. Look past the obvious offer of free hosting to see if it is a trial period, or if it is a longer term. Look at the cost of hosting if you decide to move past the free offering, and look at what is not available for free hosting.

For instance, for my classes that are just doing basic blogging, WordPress.com is a great option. But if you are wanting to add Google Analytics or work with any type of plugin for SEO, those things are not available on the free plan. Looking at the pricing, WordPress.com doesn’t let you install plugins until you reach the Business pricing of $25 a month (at time of this posting).

I have personally recently switched to bluehost.com after having previously been with GoDaddy for a long time. The reason I left GoDaddy, they wanted to charge around $100 a year for SSL, a service that is often offered for free by hosting providers. So my change, was purely economic. But migrating from one host to another comes with a lot of headaches, more on that in a someday to be written post.

Getting Started – Set up a Free WordPress site

Let’s start at the very beginning. To have a website on the Internet, you must have a host or provider. For this post, we are having you use a free account provided by WordPress.com. The video below goes through the process of setting up your free account on WordPress.com.