Hosting and Domain
First you have to get your hosting and domain!
There are a couple of them out there, and if you have one that you prefer, good. Make sure it is reliable though, because you don’t want to have your readers coming in expecting to find your blog but getting a server maintenance message! If not, you can go for HostGator – which is one of the more popular web hosting companies around.
How do you select your domain name, you’d ask?
From the SEO perspective, it would be best to select a keyword rich domain name. For example, if you are going to blog about teaching parrots to talk, then it would be wonderful to get the domain “TeachParrots.com” or something similar.
Unfortunately, with so many domain squatters around and so many websites already established, it is very difficult to find domain names that match your keywords. In this case, you may want to consider putting a filler word before or after your keywords. For example, if “ParrotTalk.com” is taken (which is, by the way), you might want to consider “MyParrotTalk.com” or “TheParrotTalk.com”.
Oh, unless you are going to post A LOT of videos or photos online, the smallest package (Hatchling – 50GB space) is good enough!
If you are using your own host, make sure it allows you to run PHP and make sure and you have at least one spare mySQL database. If you have a choice, it would be good if your host runs on CPanel administration too, because this is what I will be using to show you the installation process. HostGator runs on CPanel, and most others do too… but no worries if your is not.
I won’t be taking you though the step of getting hosting and domain… its pretty straightforward! Just follow the steps on HostGator. Go take some time to do it now! The gator is friendly, and I won’t run away, I promise!
Done? Great!
