Here’s a point of confusion I often notice when people begin their search for a blogging platform:
There are two different flavors of WordPress.
WordPress.com is a hosted platform. You go there and sign up for account, pick a pre-designed theme, and start blogging. It’s free, it’s very easy. Software updates and security are handled for you. However, You don’t have an option of custom designing your own theme, your choice of plugins andwidgets is limited. You cannot FTP into your blog.
It’s not a bad idea to go ahead and set up a blog on WordPress.com, even if you don’t intend it as your primary business blog. Make it a “cat blog”. It will give you a chance to test drive the post editor interface, practice adding images or videos with the “Add Media” tool, and get a feel for the concept of changing themes.
WordPress.org is a web site from which you can download the WordPress software. You then install the WordPress software on your own host. Same concept as installing a new program on your own computer, except that you are installing a new program on a remote “host” computer. You can install any plugins or themes you like, and customize them to your heart’s content. You can run affiliate advertising, and edit the database. You can write your own PHP code and use it in the blog’s design.
Although the WordPress.org software is free, you will need a hosting account somewhere. That’s not free. Average hosting fees run about $10 per month. My WordPress blogs are hosted on GoDaddy. BHB with much higher bandwidth requirements, is not. Where is BHB hosted now, Greg?
I have heard good comments about BlueHost. Maybe some other contributors will jump in with info on their choice of hosts.
You can register your own custom domain name and use it with either flavor of WordPress, so don’t let anyone mistakenly tell you that you can’t map a domain name to a WordPress.com site. You can.
Here is a how-to I wrote several months ago on mapping a custom domain name to a WordPress.com blog.
And as a FYI, you can register and use a custom domain name with TypePad and Blogger, too.
Here’s the how-to I wrote on how to map a domain on TypePad.
I didn’t write one for Blogger, so here is Blogger’s own how-to map a custom domain name page.
Greg Swann says:
> BHB with much higher bandwidth requirements, is not. Where is BHB hosted now, Greg?
We run from a dedicated Intel Dual-Core Linux server at HostGator in Houston (the actual file server is in Dallas). This is a high-dollar solution for most weblogging applications, but we have the ability to host an unlimited number of domains with a huge amount of storage and enough bandwidth and horse-power to withstand almost anything.
I don’t do the affiliate plan at HostGator (nor anywhere), but I’ve been very happy with them since we moved there from GoDaddy (where all of our domains are registered). For people with less demanding demands, their shared hosting plans are very robust — unlimited domains on one IP address for as little at $7.95 a month. That rocks. It means that you can host as many Single Property Web Sites or hyperlocal weblogs as you want at an incremental cost of $0.00 for hosting.
I’ve been playing in my abundant spare time with WordPress Multi-User (the underlying codebase for WordPress.com). If we deploy it, I will use a second IP address on our server (we have ten to play with), then migrate the blogs we host (twelve right now) to the new IP address one at a time. The blogs would then run from a common code bade with a common set of plug-ins. Somewhat less flexible for the individual admins, more manageable for me. This is a plausible future for many real estate webloggers, since vendors can offer “free” weblogs at what is to them an incremental cost very near $0.00. Caveat lector: This is very much a “golden handcuffs” strategy, as Matthew Hardy would have it.
June 28, 2008 — 8:30 am
Aaron Fischer says:
When you buy domains from Godaddy you can get free hosting. Unfortunately the price of free is an advertisement on your website.
June 28, 2008 — 9:44 am
Todd Carpenter says:
I use HostGator and they’re great. It cost me $13 a month to run lenderama, Denver Modern, and some other sites including the blog for RE BarCamp.
My blogs don’t get alot of comments and people have to choose to subscribe to them (less email for my server to send out). I also use FeedBurner for RSS so the demands on my share of the server are not as great as with a site like BHB, but I’m serving several thousand page views a day, sometimes that much in an hour. My uptime has been excellent.
I doubt there’s a single local real estate blogger that could overpower one of their shared plans. So, if you’re paying a specialized Real Estate hosting company more, it should make you wonder why.
Getting back to the topic of this post, Many hosting companies include a suite of hosted software called cPanel which should include a program called Fantastico Deluxe. This program allows you to install WordPress onto your site with just a few clicks of the mouse. I installed one of my blogs this way, just to check it out. It works fine, very simple. Eventually, you’ll want to learn how to use a ftp client, but getting started is easy.
June 28, 2008 — 9:45 am
Brad Shaffer says:
I currently use Site5 which is similar to what Greg spoke about. It allows for unlimited domains in addition to unlimited WordPress installations. The admin backend interface is very user friendly too (appropriately titled “Backstage”).
I use it for both business and personal websites, none of which are requiring major bandwidth at this time. But the flexibilty is fantastic as long as you are comfortable with FTP and WordPress.org (CyberDuck is a great option for Mac users for FTP).
The end result is that I have multiple websites with great flexibilty and for a cost of less than $10 per month – greatly saving money over GoDaddy or similar solutions I used in the past.
June 28, 2008 — 9:46 am
Greg Swann says:
We user CyberDuck for some FTP chores, but our main FTP client is Fetch.
That’s Fetch in my dock, along with four “droplets.” These are tiny programs that will launch Fetch, navigate to the folder you specify for that droplet, then upload any files you dragged and dropped onto the droplet. Painless.
The four droplets you see there are BloodhoundRealty.com, DistinctivePhoenix.com, engenu.us and BloodhoundBlog. When we build a Single Property Web Site, we put the droplet for that site in the site’s working folder. Same for the theme level and the top level of weblogs. If you need to go to particular server locations all the time, Fetch’s droplets are huge time-savers.
June 28, 2008 — 10:00 am
Brad Shaffer says:
I will have to check out Fetch. Besides the droplet feature, I prefer dogs to ducks.
June 28, 2008 — 10:53 am
Ken Smith says:
@Greg – WP MU is something that I plan to start playing with. Want to be able to make an update one time and cover multiple local blogs. Sounds like that is what you are looking to achieve also.
Wondering how much playing time you have had. Heard that some plugins will not work with MU and wondering if you have seen any issues.
Hard thing is there just isn’t the large number of people using MU so finding good information isn’t very easy.
June 28, 2008 — 1:36 pm
Joe Hayden says:
I’m with BlueHost and can say that they have been extremely helpful to a computer / blogging neophyte. Sometimes their first-level customer support is a little canned, but they work quickly no matter what the issue.
I cannot speak on a technical level why one is better than the other, only to say I love my WordPress site, the Cutline Themes, and what it has done for me in Google. Literally like magic if you set it up correctly…
June 28, 2008 — 6:32 pm