WordPress: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Installing WordPress on Your Web Host

There’s nothing wrong with WordPress.com—it’s cheap, relatively powerful, and has a thriving community of blogs. But the most serious WordPress users aren’t satisfied unless they can run WordPress on their own web host.

This approach, called self-hosting, gives you a world of new opportunities. For example, WordPress self-hosters can choose from a dizzying range of plug-ins to add new features to their sites. They can put a WordPress blog in the same domain as a traditional website (for example, they can have a site at www.HandMadePaintBrushes.com and a blog at www.HandMadePaintBrushes.com/news). They can slap ads on their blogs, and—most usefully of all—create sites that don’t look like blogs at all.

This chapter assumes you know, deep down in your heart, that you are a WordPress self-hoster. You aren’t willing to settle for a merely convenient WordPress.com blog when you can design exactly what you want with a self-hosted WordPress site. In the following pages, you’ll learn how to get started.

Preparing for WordPress

Before you dive into a self-hosted WordPress setup, you need to tick off a few requirements. The first is setting up an account with a web host. (If you’ve already done that, you can safely skip ahead to the next section, starting on Where to Put WordPress.)

If you’re just starting out, choosing a good web host can seem daunting. Technically, your web host needs to meet two requirements to run WordPress: First, it needs ...