So you wanna start a web site hosted on your own hosting account. As I mentioned in Start a Website, this route is a bit more complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. WordPress.org has what they call their ‘famous 5-minute installation’. In fact, it can be even faster if you choose a web host provider who has Fantastico –a script that automates installation of various popular platforms. But first things first…

Choosing a Web Host

Being a web developer myself, I’ve tried *many* web host providers. While I prefer to give my money to smaller locally owned businesses, I had issues with many smaller providers and eventually lucked out and found a great (big name) provider who blows all others out of the water.

I invite you to do your own research, and WordPress.org offers a directory of recommended web hosts, but if you want to dive right in I suggest HostMonster. In my experience, some of the other hosts are not as great as WordPress.org seems to think -as a web developer, I’ve spent quite a bit of time helping people with some of these hosts when they can’t get things to work. I’m not saying that HostMonster is perfect, but I can say that I’ve had many fewer problems with them than any of the others. And you can’t beat the price. At the time of this article, HostMonster has offered the same price of $6.95-$8.95 (depending on how many months you want to pay for at a time) per month for the last few years. The price includes registration of your own domain (yoursite.com) as well as hosting of an unlimited number of domains (you just have to pay $10 / year for the registration of each additional domain name).

Much of the following instructions will work with most full-featured web hosting companies, but the first portion is geared specifically for getting set up with HostMonster. If you want to jump ahead to non-host-specific instructions go to Page 2 of this article.

Getting Stared with HostMonster

Go to HostMonster and click the Sign Up Now button. First, you’ll need to choose a domain name. The site will guide you through finding out if the domain name you want is available. If the name you want is not available, try getting creative with adding hyphens or alternate spellings –though keep in mind it’s not fun to constantly have to spell out odd domain names when giving your site name to people verbally.

Once you’ve completed the HostMonster sign-up process, it’s time to login to your hosting account.