Totally free blogging

The two most prominent free blogging sites are Blogger and WordPress.com.

Though the ease of set up and use is tempting, there are some serious drawbacks you should consider before going this route.

Blogger is owned by Google and you may think  this is an advantage but it is not. First and foremost, the Terms of Service (TOS) gives Google rights to your content. Secondly, your URL address will end in blogspot.com which drives traffic to Google, not you. (An SEO disadvantage) Last but not least – when you realize that self hosting is much better and you choose to move your blog to a new Host, you will find that it is quite difficult, if not impossible.

Blogger is also very restrictive when it comes to customization and plugin availability, compared to the WordPress platform.

WordPress.com is probably worse because your site advertising is limited and many plugins are not supported.

Note: WordPress.com does not use the same platform as the WordPress download for self hosting (free).

You can easily avoid all this and set up free hosting with the full WordPress platform, thus eliminating any restrictions while having complete control over your blog’s appearance, behavior, and SEO.

Computertactics.com was created, and is hosted, using the following information.

Domain Names

The first thing you want to do is get a domain name that is relevant to your business or service. If this is going to be a personal site with no intent on making income don’t worry about it.

It is highly recommended to get a .com domain name. These cost less than $10/year from GoDaddy and are well worth the small investment. This will give your business credibility and show the search engines that you are for real.

If you really don’t want to spend the money www.co.cc will provide you with a domain name free of charge. Let’s say your business is selling books and you chose newnusedbooks for a name, it would then become newnusedbooks.co.cc. For the rest of this article we’ll assume you used co.cc.

Register your name and write down all the particulars like the domain name, date of registration, and login info.

Free Hosting

Computertactics offers the best free hosting available at InstanetFree, which is powered by Byethost. There are no forced ads or any requirements whatsoever.

What’s included:

Once your account is set up log in to your Vista Panel and click on “addon domains.” This is where you will enter your new domain name newnusedbooks.co.cc. At the bottom of this window you will see “name servers.” Copy down the first two, they should look like ns1.byet.org and ns2.byet.org.

Go back to www.co.cc, login, click on “Domain Settings,” then click on your domain name. You will now see a gold button that says “setup” – click this and the next window is where you enter the name server info. When you finish entering the name servers click the “setup” button again and you are good to go. Keep in mind that it could take up to 72 hours for the name servers to transfer.

Now you can go back to Byethost and start building your new site. You will find the free Site Builder in the Vista Panel under the Software section.

Free WordPress Blog installation

Simply go to your Vista Panel and find the “iVista – Easy Script Installation.” Click this open, locate WordPress and click install. You will install this into the root directory of the domain name to be used.

The install window should show a textbox with a forward slash “/” – leave this as is and click “Complete Install.”

That’s all there is to it. Your WordPress login information will be listed here; write it down so you can access your admin panel.

WordPress is designed to be managed outside of your hosting panel, therefore, it has it’s own address which is the url for your domain followed by /wp-admin (http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin).

Your login ID is admin and your password is the same as what you use for your hosting service. These can be changed in the “Profile” section of the admin panel whenever you want.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The first thing you should do is go into your Byethost control panel >online file manager >yoursitename.com >.htdocs then click “edit” for the wp-config.php file.

copy and paste this code:

if(is_admin()) {
    add_filter('filesystem_method', create_function('$a', 'return "direct";' ));
    define( 'FS_CHMOD_DIR', 0751 );
}

at the very bottom of page. DO NOT leave any spaces or blank lines after the code.

Once you do this, click the blue square icon at top left to save, then click the blue arrow to return to file manager.

log out of Byethost.

This will allow you to automatically perform upgrades to WP and other components such as plugins and themes. This also enables you to upload themes and plugins from the WP control panel.

Should you decide that you do not have the time, or not want to deal with the technicalities, we can set all this up for you plus add themes and plugins so you are ready to start blogging.

Please visit our “Services” page for details.

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Tags: Blogging Tips, free domain name, free hosting, Wordpress

This entry was posted on December 12, 2009 at 12:41 pm and is filed under All Categories >>>, Blogging Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.