How to go Self-Hosted on your Blog

Hi Guys & Gals! Welcome to my new, re-designed, self-hosted WordPress blog!

For those of you that have stumbled on this post and did not know my blog before I used to have a Blogger blog: EllesBellesGradBlog.

It was started, along with my book blog, as a pastime to fill my empty days at University. But since leaving University I have found I’ve made it something more than a pastime!

And for the last year, I’ve been thinking about going self-hosted and moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress.

The reasons for going self-hosted:

1. Your blog will be entirely your own. There is no chance of your blog going down or being deleted by someone else. It is your website.
2. The URL will no longer contain a hosting site in the title i.e. no more EllesBellesGradBlog.co
3. You own the Domain so no one else can have a blog with your name and mess up your SEO
4. Your blog appears more professional and you now have advertising capabilities which may appeal to brands
5. You have more space to upload photos, videos, and links. On free blog websites, you are limited.

There are many different reasons for going self-hosted. Personally, I wanted to invest in my blog and make it more professional. And I’m so glad I did.

After umming and erring about how and where and what to do I saw a really encouraging and enlightening post by Naomi Rowan. She explains how she used SiteGround and the process of getting your own domain.

SiteGround is a great place to purchase a self-hosting package. I found a lot of the websites that offered the service confusing but SiteGround was easy to understand. And they have a 24/7 free chat which you can access before you buy the domain in order to talk the pros and cons through first. More on this chat later.

There are three packages to choose from:

I chose the first package: StartUp as I only wanted to upgrade one of my blogs (it was still young) which needed transferring from Blogger to WordPress. A website transfer and the registration of a domain name are included in the price of £2.95 a month (billed in one lump sum of £36.90 inc VAT).

I spoke to someone on the 24/7 chat throughout the entire process and the actual buying and registering of the domain was so easy!

Make sure you have a domain name, and possibly a spare or two, ready for when you get to this step. You may be told that the domain is already registered by someone else so you may have to use another one. Make sure you’re comfortable with it before proceeding to payment as you cannot change your domain name after you’ve paid.

The next step is the payment, which can be done in various ways (i.e. debit, Paypal, credit card etc) and is the same to pay on a website such as Amazon or Asos.

And that’s it! Your domain is your own. You have a website.

I will be doing a follow-up post on how I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress in the next week! So be sure to watch out for that!

In the meantime, if you have any questions about going self-hosted or using SiteGround just let me know! I was always asking questions so I am happy to answer any!

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