Wordpress Lets You Do That?

First things first. There are a couple of ways to host your Wordpress blog. You can use the services of a free Wordpress host easily enough but as we know free things usually have their downfalls. By hosting on a free host your blog is at the mercy of their rules, and if your blog happens to go outside of these rules your blog can be shut down without warning. With some free hosts this can be something as simple as putting in an affiliate link. They can change the rules overnight so be warned.

The alternative to this is of course have your own host and install Wordpress yourself. Hosting these days is very inexpensive and there are some excellent services that allow you to host unlimited domains with your package. When you have a lot of blogs and websites this could save you a lot of money.

The majority of hosts use a backend platform called C Panel. C Panel is very easy to use and work with, and makes installing Wordpress a breeze as it does it all for you. Your hosting company will tell you where in C Panel you can find the install application, but usually this is found in the Fantastico script library. You simply choose  where you want the Wordpress install directed to, and it automatically does the rest. If your site is hosted with a Plesk panel, then I would suggest that you speak to the server administrator for assistance:)

If you will be using the  domain name as your blog, then you would point it to the root folder. If you want to make the blog a sub-directory, then you just type in what you want it called, and point it to that.

You can install more than one version of Wordpress on your server, it is just a case of repeating the install process.

Once you have done your install you will be automatically emailed your login details for later reference.

Now that we have a nice shiny new version of Wordpress on our server, we want to start making some modifications. To do this we will need an FTP client, and that will be the topic of the next post.