WordPress Hosting

Here I discuss hosting options for the world's most popular blog software.

WordPress has become so popular that many hosting providers offer "WordPress Hosting" as an alternative to their normal hosting plans. When you see a hosting company offer WordPress hosting, this generally means that, when you create an account, WordPress is automatically installed and configured. In other words, you can start blogging immediately.

WordPress hosting typically includes automatic updates to WordPress. This means that there's no need for you to do these updates yourself — when a new version of WordPress is available, your hosting provider will update it for you.

WordPress Hosting — The Easy Way

Our partner site ZappyHost offers WordPress hosting, which means you can start blogging straight away. When you create an account, WordPress is automatically installed and configured.

ZappyHost also looks after all WordPress updates too. WordPress is continously releasing updates, so it's convenient not to have to worry about keeping an eye out for them.

WordPress Hosting — The "More Involved" Way

If you don't use a WordPress hosting plan like the one above, you'll need to install WordPress yourself.

Perhaps you already have a hosting account and simply want to install WordPress onto it? Well, your currently hosting plan may already have WordPress available and ready to install. Check with your hosting provider.

Many hosting plans offer hosting for WordPress but in most cases you still need to go through the installation process after you've registered your hosting account. In other words, WordPress is not instantly available like it is with the above plan.

If your hosting account doesn't include WordPress, you will need to download it yourself. You will then need to upload it to your hosting account. Then you will need to install it onto your hosting account. The download files and full instructions are available from WordPress.org.

About Free WordPress Hosting

I should also mention that there is free hosting for WordPress through WordPress.com, however this is not ideal if you're serious about blogging. As a free service, you don't get your own domain name, eg "myblog.com". Instead, it comes under WordPress.com, so you never really own your blog. They also reserve the right to display ads on your blog too. To remove the limitations of their free service, you need to upgrade to a paid service. For more about free blogs, see Create a Free Blog.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with upgrading to their premium service, but just make sure you check their pricing first because they have different prices for different things, depending on what you want.

About WordPress

WordPress is an open source blogging platform powered by PHP and MySQL. As well as powering blogs, many companies also customize WordPress into a Content Management System (CMS) for their main website.

As the world's most popular blogging platform, WordPress is used by some of the most famous bloggers and biggest websites on the web.

WordPress is available as a free download for installation onto your blog or website. Once you've downloaded it, you need to go through the installation process. But as mentioned, if you use WordPress hosting, your account will already have WordPress installed.