Hosting WordPress site in a shared hosting system has been increasing since it is very easy and cheap to afford. It may seem very straightforward for experienced user but to a beginner or a user with no computer science background, the process could be very complicated without proper knowledge and guidance. Read through this guide to learn completely about WordPress and how to setup it on shared hosting system.
What is WordPress and why use it for your website?
WordPress is a popular open-source content management system (CMS) which allows you to create websites without any coding experience. WordPress provides all the tools for you to create and manage your posts and pages for your websites. It is free and can be created by anyone from novice to intermediate and advanced user.
Blogging used to be the major purpose for using WordPress to create a website but since the increasing of active developers and community, it is now used to create all sorts of websites. There are tons of free and paid cool theme built for WordPress which you can choose for your websites. Feature and functionality of a WordPress site are developed through plugins which are offered free and premium. It is because of these plugins, WordPress has emerged from more than just a blogging system to a system having capabilities of all sorts of web services. Some of the things you can do in WordPress are:
- Blogging
- Ecommerce
- Online Forum
- Social Network Platform
- Business websites
WordPress offers two major ways to create websites. They are:
- WordPress.org – In WordPress.org, it gives you a WordPress installation file, which you have to manually install it on your own hosting server and must have your own domain. You will get all the control of the file and can customize it to your preferred content. You are free to install any themes and plugins to your site. You must have a hosting server which supports PHP and MYSQL system since WordPress is build on top of PHP programming language and uses MySQL database. Most of the hosting system supports both PHP and MySQL and will not be a hassle when choosing a hosting system. You can also customize the site with the help of PHP developers to meet your needs, there is not limit actually.
Since everything is under your own control you must monitor the system occasionally. In comparison to wordpress.com it might cost some money and time for setup of domain and hosting space.
You can choose wordpress.org if you want to host your site in your own domain hosting server and also if you have a lot of customization to add to the site. - WordPress.com – WordPress.com offers a free and self hosting solution of your websites which means you don’t have to own any domain or server in compare to wordpress.org. WordPress.com is good if you don’t want to go through all the trouble of setting up a hosting server and manually installing it.
WordPress.com gives you a free hosting space to store your media files and a free subdomain of wordpress.com. It only provides a sub domain of format [example.wordpress.com] which if you want to later transfer to your individual domain may cost you money. You don’t get all control of your sites and and you might not be able to customize the site according to your will. You will also not be able to install some third party plugins to enhance your sites. But still it is is completely free while in wordpress.org, you have to spend money to own a domain and a hosting space.
You can consider choosing wordpress.com if you are fine with having a subdomain of wordpress.com and don’t have any plan of customizing it.
What is Shared Hosting?
You may have a heard a lot about shared hosting server as it is very cheap and popular among beginner and small business owners. And if you are new to shared hosting, after reading it you will be clear about it. There are lot of hosting plan with different specification such as Dedicated hosting, VPS hosting and Shared hosting. Shared hosting is the most low tier and cheapest among all other hosting plan.
In Shared hosting, your website shares the resources of a web hosting server with other user websites. So there may arise a time when your site may not open or work if the web hosting server has a lot of websites accessing the resources. Shared hosting are most suitable with beginner and low traffic sites. It may not be suitable and can’t handle sites with large number of traffic but you can always upgrade your sites to VPS or dedicated hosting plan when you start to have a lot of traffic to your site.
So if you want a cheap hosting plan, shared hosting is the best option for you.
Now how to setup WordPress to your Shared hosting server?
After purchasing a shared hosting server, the hosting provider will provide you a cPanel to manage your files. cPanel is a system in hosting server system which gives you a platform to install files and, databases to your sites. You can access your cPanel through your domain URL [yoursite.com/cPanel].
- Install WordPress through a script installer in your cPanel. Most cPanel will have Softaculous app installer which consist of a lot of scripts for your site.
- Now setup your site credentials. When choosing domain URL protocol always choose “https://” over “http//” since “https” is more secure than the other. Leave directory field empty if you want to install in the main domain.
Then complete site setting fields such as site name and site title. You can also change it afterwards too through the WordPress dashboard.
Now configure admin username and admin password. These are the username and password of the dashboard of your WordPress site. - Then choose a language and input a name for a database to be created. You can leave all the field as it is. After that select any theme and click on install button to complete setup your WordPress site in shared hosting. Installing will take some few time You will be able to change your WordPress theme afterwards.
After installing is finished, open your domain url and you will see a default WordPress theme installed. You can login through your site dashboard by this URL [yoursite.com/wp-admin]. Enter your previous configured username and password to access your database. Now you can customize your site as you want form the WordPress dashboard.
Hope you’re able to setup your WordPress site in shared hosting properly. If you’re still having problem, you can always contact us through this site. You can also visit this site to learn more about WordPress and other related content.