Comments on: Wanna Start a Blog?

By: clayboy » From evolving carnivals to Crossley’s Chomskian critique: this week’s round-up

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 23:00:51 +0000

[...] bibliobloggers there’s a post of start-up advice from Mark Goodacre who prefers Blogger, and a follow-up from Pat McCullough who thinks WordPress is where it’s [...]

By: Mark Goodacre

Mark Goodacre — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:17:23 +0000

Thanks, Pat, for the interesting post. Your mention of RefTagger reminded me to get it installed on my blog too.

By: jondh

jondh — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:21:22 +0000

Well, you’ll always have to pay for your own domain name, although you may want to consider moving your domain to another registrar than Automattic (aka WordPress.com) for about half the yearly charge.

When it comes to web hosting, though, there are a couple of things you can do. Phil’s suggestion sounds pretty good; never thought of doing it that way. You’ll have to make sure, though, that the host provider’s user agreement with the does not explicitly prohibit that kind of account sharing.

Another way to do it is to set up an account with a free hosting service. Some of these are pretty dodgy; many do not last very long and some require you to display their ads on their site. Some, however, are very reputable, have been around for a number of years, and offer very good services. Although you’ll have limits placed on you (e.g. a certain amount of space, a certain number of domain names, a certain amount of databases, etc.), these are usually more than sufficient for hosting your own blog. Who needs “unlimited” everything anyway unless they run a media-heavy site, online gaming service, or internet store?

I use three services that I really like and am happy to recommend them. I won’t post the links to avoid getting shut out by your spam filter, but they can easily be find with a search:

1. Byet hosting
2. hosthelpers.com
3.BlackAppleHost.com

You will have to spend a little bit of time learning how to manage your site and uploading and installing WordPress, but resources are plentiful, and you can always ask other blogger friends. WordPress.org offers detailed instructions on what to upload, how to install, and how to migrate your wordpress.com blog to your own site. It’s as simple as export>import.

My one piece of advice with any web host, paid or free, is DO NOT install WordPress with any automatic installer (like Fantastico). Fantastico will set up your PHP database in an non-unicode format and then you will not able to use anything on your blog but Latin characters. No Greek, Hebrew or anything. Better install WordPress yourself, even if it does take a little extra work.

By: Phil Gons

Phil Gons — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:16:04 +0000

The answer is to jump on board with someone else. Some cheap hosting accounts allow unlimited domain names, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited disk space. It’s a marketing plow to get customers to pick them. They know the vast majority will barely use any of that.

I pay $7 a month, but share a little bit of that cost with another guy who has his WP blog under my account. For $1 or 2 a month you could jump on with me. Or just go in with a couple of your buddies and split the cost. Cheap hosting can start for as little as $5 a month (but will probably go up a bit after the introductory term ends).

BTW, I use Host Monster and have been pretty pleased with them.

By: Patrick George McCullough

Patrick George McCullough — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:15:17 +0000

Thanks for stopping by, jondh. From what I’ve seen, though, it costs more to do that. I only pay $15/year. Do you have suggestions to keep the cost down of self-hosting? Are there accessible tutorials to make the switch to WP.org?

By: jondh

jondh — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 05:05:23 +0000

The answer, of course, is to host your own blog using WordPress from WordPress.org. You might have to learn a little, but you get versatility to your heart’s content.