If you have a free blog at WordPress.com, it will be very limited to what you can do with it. You many want to consider moving your blog to a paid hosting account. free domain registration
That way you will have complete control and you don’t have to worry about WordPress deleting or tagging for blog for any Terms of Agreement violation.
Even if you don’t have a lot of posts at the free WordPress blog but I am sure you don’t want to lose them. These steps will make your move extremely easy.
1. Find a hosting company. A blog does not normally take up a lot of room so you can just start out with a cheap plan. Many hosting companies have an Economy Plan that is under $5.00 a month.
Of course the longer you purchase the hosting plan the cheaper it should be. You may want to purchase for 2 – 3 years, that way you can usually get a discount on the price and if you decide to move to a different hosting company you should be refunded the unused time.
2. Register your domain. Many hosting companies also let you register your domain name with them and give you a discount. Also, having your domain name and hosting account together makes it easier to keep track of.
3. Wait for setup. Once you have purchased your hosting and domain name (from whomever you decide). You have to wait for the hosting company to set up your host plan. This can take anywhere from a few hours to 48 hours.
4. Once setup is complete. If you have never had paid hosting take a look around in your admin area and look at all the different information that is available for you.
Once hosting is set up sign into your account.
5. Under the area of My Products (or something to that effect), click on your hosting accounts.
6. This will take you to another page that shows your domain name and if your hosting plan is ready, you can click on Open and it will take you to your hosting panel.
7. Your control panel. Most hosting companies now have an area for a quick set-up of wordpress blogging software. Look for something that may say “Fantastico De Luxe” or Hosting Connections. Here is the place where you can install WordPress to your domain.
8. There are a few different ways to add the WordPress blogging software on your new domain:
On the domain: yourdomainname.com
As a sub-domain: yourdomainname.com/blog
As an addon domain: blog.yourdomainname.com
If you only have the blogging software, it may be better to set-up WordPress on the domain name itself. But some people say that an addon domain is better if you are going to have a website and want your blog attached to it.
On the domain: Just click the install and it will ask you which domain, click on that and for the “Install in directory” leave this blank. The admin access data will be your user name and password, Then go through all the rest of the steps.
As a sub-domain: If you want to have it like that, you need to put in the “Install in directory”, The name you want – example: blog, my blog etc… This will then create the directory for it. You do not need to create it.
As an Addon Domain: You need to first set up the addon domain before you can install WordPress. In your control panel, create an addon domain, Whatever you name this that will be where you put your blog.
So if you call the addon domain My Blog then the above will be the URL for it (myblog.yourdomainname.com). It may take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours for the system to set this up.
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