DIY: How to buy a domain name, hosting and set up WordPress Manually
In this guide, we will be covering all the aspects of buying a domain name, hosting and setting up WordPress (manually).
Please note we would be covering the above points from the perspective of a layman (who has never been exposed to or done this before)
Looking for some help with a domain name, hosting or WordPress website? Feel free to contact us.
Website Development:
Gone are the days when website development was dominated by Computer Engineering Grads. Now developing a business website has become very easy, thanks to the CMS systems. By CMS we mean content management systems, i.e. we can build a website without writing a single line of code. There are a number of CMS systems available some of which are WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Joomla, Magento, Opencart etc.
In this guide, we will be focusing on WordPress, later if time permits will add a guide for Wix & Shopify as well. These tools will help us build both business and e-commerce websites. you can explore Joomla Magento and opencart as well however, they are more complex when compared to the ones which we will be covering in this guide.
WordPress:
There are two ways of making a website using WordPress. One is using wordpress.com (will be referred to as .com from now on) and second is using wordpress.org (will be referred to as .org from now on). The fundamental difference between the two is that .com has paid plans whereas .org can be downloaded by anyone to be used as they please.
I personally recommend using .org as that is more economical when compared to .com. For those who want to explore .com, since both are same except for the starting points, we will include the starting point which will help you get started & rest will be the same as for .org
Step I: Booking a Domain Name
Step II: Getting a reliable hosting
Step III: Linking Domain Name to hosting
Step IV: Installing WordPress
Step I: Booking a Domain Name
You can book your domain name from any of the domain booking websites, however, I personally use one of these sites to book the domain name https://www.crazydomains.in/ , https://hosting.india.to/ or https://www.bigrock.in/
PS: Before booking your domain check the hosting step as well since many sites give complimentary free domain name with the purchase of the annual hosting plan
Steps are pretty simple.
(PS: using crazy domains.in for purpose of the demo)
Enter the domain name you want to book and hit the search button.
It may happen so that the .com domain may not be available, however, you can choose an alternate extension or modify the name.
In this case, I have chosen to go with myfirstwebsite.org.in for 2 years, you can order from 1 year to 5 years. Now click to Go to cart.
PS: Crazydomains is currently offering Linux Hosting — Economy with purchase of domain name, however, you can ignore it, for now, we will discuss it when we discuss hosting.
Review your cart details and click on Pay Securely.
Once done you can sign-in to complete your order or sign-up (login/registration using Facebook is also supported)
Screen to sign-up
Please note that many hosting companies on the next page will try and up-sell you other stuff. These are totally optional.
With this, we conclude the first step of the process.
Step II: Getting a reliable hosting
As a layman, people always get confused between a domain name and hosting. To simplify this you can consider Domain name as a brand name whereas, hosting is where the website files are stored.
The domain name is pointed to the hosting from which it will serve the website i.e. the website will be visible.
Ok so now that you know it’s importance lets understand the different types of hostings which are available.
- Shared hosting
- Dedicated hosting
- Cloud hosting (highly recommended)
- VPS hosting
- WordPress hosting (if budget is the constraint)
- Managed WordPress hosting
PS: the ones in bold are good for WordPress hosting Details:
- Shared hosting: This is good for low traffic static websites but not recommended for WordPress esp when you are planning to set up an e-commerce website using WordPress.
- Dedicated hosting: This is good with a good amount of bandwidth, however, not recommended for non-coders as this requires good experience in managing servers
- Cloud hosting: There are 2 types in this category
- Self Managed Cloud hosting: AWS — Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, I would again not recommend this for a layman as you need the experience to manage them.
- Managed Cloud hosting: Though the name is cloud they come with the easy panel to manage the website files. (recommended)
You can book your hosting from any of the hosting websites, however, I personally use one of these sites to book hosting for my clients https://www.hostinger.com/ or https://www.hostgator.com/ or https://www.hostgator.in/
Steps are pretty simple.
(PS: using hostgator.in for purpose of the demo)
For the purpose of the demo, we will select the cloud hosting plan.
If it’s a single website (single domain name) and you are just starting, you can go with the first plan.
You can choose an appropriate option if you choose No, they will ask you to register one. I have selected Yes in this case.
Many hosting will add some additional options as well you can de-select them as they are not needed in most cases.
Review your order and click on Continue.
Register with any of the options and proceed to pay.
You can pay with the selected option and we are done.
With this, we conclude the second step of the Website Development process. Once done we will get access to Cpanel. PS: if you purchased the domain name and hosting from different websites, you will have to link the two. All the websites support help us with it, but we will still check this in the next step.
Step III: Linking Domain name with Hosting Service
Before we move towards installing WordPress on our newly purchased hosting, we will first have to make sure the domain name is pointing to the hosting we just purchased. Let’s see how we can do that.
Login to the website from where you purchased the hosting and look for nameserver details.
Log in with your credentials.
PS: Sometimes it may ask you to verify that you are not a robot using Google recaptcha
Once you have logged in click on Manage Orders -> List/Search Orders.
In this case, it’s just one so we will click on it.
Once you are on the page which has the details of the order, click on the Nameserver Details.
Copy-paste these nameserver details on a text file. We will need to update these on the website where we have purchased our domain name.
PS: If you find this complex or time-consuming, you can simply provide the nameserver details to the support team of the website from which you have purchased the domain and they will help you update it. However, I would recommend, you learn this yourself.
Let’s now visit the website on which we have purchased the domain name. In this case, I will use CrazyDomains.in, however, the steps remain the same.
We click on the login button
We will select Account Manager from the dropdown and login with our credentials
Next we click on Visit My Account button
select the domain for which you want to update the nameservers.
Click on modify on the right side.
Delete the extra nameserver fields if any. Remember we just have two values to be inserted
Update the nameserver details under the Host Name textbox and hit the update button.
PS: the nameserver pointing process i.e. by the time your domain name gets linked to your hosting is 4 to 48 hours, so if you don’t immediately see it linked don’t hit the panic button.
Now we can access our Cpanel and install WordPress to manage our website, which is our next step.
Login to the website from where you purchased the hosting and look for nameserver details.
Step IV: Installing WordPress
You will see the Download WordPress button. The version may be different, it was 5.3.2 when this document was made.
You can download it on your desktop; I have created a WordPress directory to save it there.
Once we have downloaded it, we will go to the hosting as shown in the previous step and click on manage hosting.
We will see the above screen and we need to click on File Manager
I’ll now click on the upload button and import the WordPress files from the desktop.
On the next screen, we will click on Select File.
We will upload it.
Once it is done, the status bar will be green.
Once done, you will need to click on to see your files.
Now that is done, we will extract the files from the zip.
It will confirm the directory, you can change if you want to edit the position. Now click on Extract Files.
Once done, you will see such a notice.
Once done, you can see the files on the panel.
We can get rid of the .zip file
Right-click and click on Delete button to delete the files
Click on Confirm once you get the pop-up
Now that we have done the upload of the files we can now go to the URL and we will select the language.
Here we need the following details before we proceed. Database Name, Database User, Database Password and Database Host.
To set this up, we will go back to the CPanel. And Click on MySQL Database Wizard.
First we will create a Database. Please note the name as we will need to use it later. Most of the servers will have some prefix e.g. somename_wordpress (I am hiding it for security reasons); be sure not to share these details with anyone but make sure you save it somewhere you can access them later.)
Once done; you need to create a Database User. (A Database user is someone which can access the database, a bit technical but you can ignore and just follow this step)
We will need to select All Privileges.
We have now successfully created the database and the database user with password. We can now proceed to the next step.
We will update the requested details and click on submit.
Also read: Important Concepts of Off-Page SEO
Make sure the password is medium or strong.
Now you can log in to the WordPress Admin using the username or email id and password.
This is what we see when we visit the website. Hurray, we are done with the website setup! Now we will go ahead and actually start making our website, we will soon be having an article on that process as well.
Do drop in your doubts or views in the comments sections about this domain hosting and WordPress guide.
Thanks for reading.
Originally published at https://www.sociomarker.com on March 28, 2020.