Running your business takes a lot of effort. You may have hired a Webmaster to build and update your website for you. Though it was a great idea at the time, you quickly realized that he is on complete control of your website. You are at his mercy whenever you need updates, and he charges you each time you ask him to perform a simple task. If you have considered managing your own website, take a look at what self hosted wordpress blog has to offer.

WordPress has grown  into the most popular blogging tool around. However, its blog popularity has detracted from the fact that it is a powerful Content Management System. WordPress allows you the option to build a website along with your blog or by itself. The best part is that WP is free.

If you are looking for a great solution to your current web hosting situation,  consider switching to WordPress and create your “wordpress host”.

Avoid paying an expensive Webmaster to perform tasks you can do on your own, and gain complete control over your website today.

WordPress host  provides excellent search engine optimization tools for your web business. Update your content easily.

You don’t need to know the complete HTML and .PHP or .ASP code like your former Webmaster.

WordPress uses a simple rich text editor that shows you exactly what your site will look like when published. This eliminates the need to purchased software like Adobe Dreamweaver, which is an CODE editor.

You have vide range of plugins and themes at your fingertips for your wordpress host. Some include surveys and polls, contact forms, ratings, and hundreds more.

WordPress hosting and finding the best provider

When it comes to selecting WordPress hosting you need to make the right choice for your website and even the general rules are quite helpful !

If other WordPress blogs are hosted with them, it means that such web host already have a number of different wordpress hosting blogs, which is nice enough indication that the service provider is good & reliable and if there were some problems with setup  they have already experienced and fixed them .

The number of blogs isn’t the sole basis for judging, but is a good enough factor. A larger number of blogs, hosted by a single web host also mean that those people who have their service hosted there  are happy with the quality of the services provided by the hosting provider.

Downtime  is the major concern for most website owners, as downtime can seriously hamper the normal working of any site. Here is the same rule – A company that offers a much lower downtime should be considered.

WordPress isn’t resource heavy, but wordpress hosting it does require a minimum system requirement. Check with the service provider if they are equipped with the minimum requirement necessary for hosting WordPress.

Today it is very easy to install wordpress,  since you  have the auto install option on wordpress hosting server.

Back in the old days you had to manually upload the files to  server,  set the account  details in config.php

and then execute the install file.

Today  on most servers you have the auto install option and the servers that don´t offer this wodress install in few clicks i wouldn´t consider as an option

no matter how cheap  their hosting service is.

Instead of telling you just how easy it is to install WordPress with this auto install option, I’ll describe it.

Depending on your host, your steps may vary slightly, but these steps are valid for most major webhosts.

Here are the steps for wordpress install :

Log into your control panel

Go to the section called script installer or “Fantastico” depending on your host

find the link to WordPress

Follow the instructions to install WordPress

Install WordPress into its own directory

After the installation completes, log into the admin panel and you’re good to go

More detailed about requrements you can read in my other post,  but just  brief desqcription, here is what you need:

MYSQL databese for wordpress  install (most servers offer that) MySQL is the database system that WordPress needs on the back end in order to work.

Then you need php, which is a web programming language that acts as the front end that lets your web browser interact with the MySQL backend that WordPress stores the data on.  Your hosting, should run on linux. This is the operating system of the host computer that WordPress lives on.

Premium wordpress hosting offers you service,  that you  can

automatically install the WordPress content management system or your personal blog.

No need for  FTP  accounts or uploading anything.

The wordpress package is hosted on your wordpress hosting  server  and you  can start installation  from there.

Premium hosting offers you  all most popular  scripts  for  one click install.

You simply picka up  a user name and possword  and  domain  on  which  you  want your wordress  to be hosted and click install.

There  should also  be  free tutorials on  the  server, so  you  can  learn  everything  you need to know.

Installation shouldn’t take more then a  few  seconds and your wordpress blog is installed  and hosted and you  are ready from creating your content bloging.

Run wordpress as your privately hosted blog you need:
PHP v 4.3 or greater and MySQL v 4.1.2 or greater

I would  recommend Apache as most feautureful server for running WordPress, and most servers use it.

Now you are not able to know if wordpress will work  as it suppose to on every possible server environment
and  that’s why it  s  recommended to host it  on proven  and reliable hosts, which  I will mention latter  !

WordPress standards and features

WordPress has full compliance with the standards of the W3C, which is important
for compatibility with web browsers and tools of the next generation.

Features:

WordPress pages are designed  for static non-blog content (such as ABOUT page)

and  wordpress posts are the blog content.

Post and pages can be visible to search  engines or  hidden,  they can  both be
password protected or public.

You are able to allow  comments to your posts and pages  and also  trackbacks and pingbacks to your post/page.

Also spam protection and user integration with selecting roles (multiple Authors),  such  as:  Subscriber, Author, Editor, Administrator

multi user envirement.

WordPress  also  has a ping  engine built in,  so when  you write a post or page it will be ping for search engine exposure.

Now  for  pinging you  need additional plugin, which i will describe latter,  so that your post  is not pinged evey time you edit it , otherwise
you could get banned from the search engines.

You may install wordpress on your local host and give it a test drive !

But your local platform with  WAMP or LAMP  package  can  act  a bit different  then online server.

Each server can have  settings adjusted a bit different then your local computer.
For example: in  wp-config.php you can  enter server adress or leave localhost as mentioned there (works with most providers)

There are also some slight differences in permalinks setup between wordpress blog on different  machines  depending on  their server settings.

Then,  there is also a question of additional plugins you want to run on your wordpress  blog. Some of plugins at some providers  simply do not work by  default,  since they have some  security settings adjusted the way some protocol needed for plugin execution is blocked.

It can be very stressing at  first, because you don’t know why  plugin  that is supposed to work is reporting some error.
Before you decide to contact support and give them  a question about it  ,  you  probobly spent some tima allready trying to figure out if  you did something wrong,  especially if you are a wordpress beginer.

So conclusion is: It is very important  to choose the right wordpress hosting provider.