If you ever wanted to start your website, don’t let anything hold you back! Many people think starting a website is difficult but it is easy, really. All you need to do is follow this guide and you will have a WordPress website up and running on a WordPress Web Hosting in no time.
Why You NEED a WordPress Website
Whether you are a hobbyist, freelancer, a small business, or a huge company, you are going to need a website. As there are endless types of websites, you are sure to find one that will fit and benefit you. You can start a blog website, an e-commerce website, a portfolio website, a courses website, and whatnot. One of the many reasons why you might want your website is to start making money online. Almost all types of websites will allow you to start making money online and a WordPress website will be a good start due to its modularity and the wide verity of options.
It is important to say, a website might be a good way to make money online but you will have to put some hard work into it. Nothing comes free 🙂
Start Your WordPress Website
To start your WordPress website you are going to need a few things but worry not! Just follow this guide and at the end you will have your WordPress website up and running.
What a Domain is
Let’s start by understanding what a domain is. A domain is the “address” you write in your browser’s search bar to find the website you want to go to. For example, if you would look at your search bar now, you will see this website’s domain “kodacoding.com”. Whenever you type in the search bar “kodacoding.com”, it knows to open this website. But how?
A website is hosted on a server and each server has an address on the internet. This address is the server’s IP address. Let me ask you this: will it be easier for you to remember “kodacoding.com” or something like “255.178.45.163”? I believe the answer will be “kodacoding.com“. You can think of a domain as an alias for the server’s IP address. so whenever you write “kodacoding.com”, it is translated to the IP of the server hosting the website.
Get Your Domain
For this guide it is not necessary to buy a domain as the hosting provider we are going to use will provide a temporary one for us. If you don’t want to buy a domain just yet, you can skip to the “Server and a Hosting Provider” section.
Just like there are hosting providers that host your website or web application, there are also domain registrars. Domain registrars allow you to buy a domain and point it to your hosting server’s IP. A domain cost is different, depending on the domain and the registrar you buy it from. It starts as low as 1$ a year and can get as high as 50,000$ a year, and even higher.
Here are some domain registrars you can buy your domain from (no affiliate):
Get You Domain From GoDaddy
You can purchase a domain name from any other domain registrar but in this guide, we will use GoDaddy.
Open GoDaddy and the search bar, search for the domain you want to purchase.
In the next screen, if the desired domain is already taken, GoDaddy will give you an option to use their Broker Service Fee but we won’t be covering this in this guide. Also, if the desired domain is taken, GoDaddy will show you alternatives.
After you find a domain you like and is not taken, add it to the cart and start the checkout process.
WordPress Web Hosting – Server and a Hosting Provider
Simply put, a server is just a computer that can be accessed via the internet. When you access a website using your browser, what happens is that your browser goes to the relevant server (according to the explanation in the “last “What a Domain is”) and reads the relevant file. This file contains the code for the page you want to load and might include loading other files too. In the end, your browser translates the files’ code into what you see on the screen. This process is called “rendering”.
A hosting provider is a company that has many servers and offers its clients to host their websites on the company’s server. These companies usually provide support, server management, securing the server, and more.
Here are some hosting providers:
- CloudWays
- Bluehost
- Hostinger
- SiteGround
- WPEngine
Host Your Website on a Server
When it comes to a hosting provider, after trying multiple WordPress web hosting providers, we recommend CloudWays. We have been using their services for more than two years now. Their support is 24/7 and quick to answer, their system allows you to easily manage your website and easily integrate Git, a reliable backup system, and much more.
These reasons led us to start affiliating with CloudWays. Because we can trust them, they are reliable, and we too are using their services as a hosting provider for a few years now with different websites.
WordPress Web Hosting with CloudWays
CloudWays allows you to start your hosting for free. If you are not sure if you want to host your website at CloudWays, you should start free. To do that, open CloudWay’s home page and click “START FREE”. and go through the registration process.
After you finish the registration process, you will see CloudWay’s welcome screen.
Close the welcome popup by click the “START NOW” button and let’s create our first WordPress website.
In the presented screen, you can choose what service CloudWays will use for your server. We are going to choose DigitalOcean.
In the following section, you can choose what kind of application (website) you would like CloudWays to create on your server. You can also provide the application’s name, the server’s name and a project to assign the application you are creating to. The project is only for your convenience and is optional.
Choose the server size according to your needs. If you are going to upload a lot of media files such as images and videos to your website, choose a bigger server size. We are going to keep it at 2GB.
Lastly, choose the location you would like the server to be hosted at. We are going to use Frankfurt.
In the lower section, CloudWays tells you how much you will pay for this setup once the free trial is over.
After a few moments of automatic setup, your application (website) is ready with a CloudWays sub-domain. To access it, click on the “www” and choose your application.
To open the application itself, click on the following symbol and user the credentials in the “ADMIN PANEL” section
You Now Have a WordPress Web Hosting!
By this point, you have a website according to the application type you chose in the set up stage. You also have a domain, or a temporary one. In a following guide we will see how we can use the domain we purchased with the application we just created on CloudWays.
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