4 easy steps to set up your self hosted wordpress blog

Here, I would like to share my experience of finding and setting up my blog on my web hosting service provider.

1) Choosing the host:

Since the start of my blogging activities I have followed Digitalpoint Forums religiously, which in a way have immensely helped me in choosing my blog host. I found the reviews for dreamhost web hosting more or less good all over. With features like 500 GB of disk storage on sign up increasing by 2GB every week, 5TB monthly bandwidth increasing by 40 GB every week, one free domain, unlimited domains and subdomains (that can be hosted), very less outage time. It took me no time to choose this as my preferred choice of Web Host.I registered with dreamhost on 11/Dec/07, luckily that was the last day when they allowed $97 discount for the new members. Now the maximum discount offered by them is $50.

2) WordPress Installation:

Within half an hour of subscribing and making payments, I received emails detailing about email and FTP services. Then came wordpress installation part, dreamhost offers a very simple ‘one click installation’ for wordpress(along with other installation options like forums). This can be done either in the root folder eg: ReviewOfWeb.com or you can create a wordpress folder of your own for eg: ReviewOfWeb.com/wordpress. Unless you intend to put your blog itself at the subdomain level, I would suggest you to stick with root folder only and not a seperate wordpress folder ( because of some security issues that comes along with it)

3) Choosing theme:

WP provides a number of built-in themes( through the presentation tab) or through http://themes.wordpress.net/. Other than these, you can get zillions of themes for a google search on “wp themes”. I suggest if you are a newbie to blogging stick with themes provided by WP, they are tested for IE, Firefox layout and other possible problem areas.

4) FTP client or Web Ftp:

FTP stands for File transfer Protocol whereby you can transfer your files to the web host. There are step by step instructions in the mailer from dreamhost to accomplish this task. You have two options here, either download any FTP client or use the web option provided by dreamhost https://webftp.dreamhost.com/ . I prefer the latter just because its simplicity.
Thats it! You are all set to make your mark on web. Enjoy Blogging.

Note: You can use the promocode HIGHESTDISCOUNT1 to get the maximum possible discount of $50 on dreamhost.