hosting wordpress Question: I had a website with wordpress and hosting with hostgator… I cancelled the hosting …?
I did not know that I would lose my website… what about the domain name that I purchased can I still use it? Are there any free websites that I can still use the same domain name? And free hosting as well? Are there any sites that are free to setup and allow to post banners and adsense? Thank you to any replies!

Best Response:

Answer by James
The domain should still be yours. When you cancelled your account with host gator you should have ask about your domain, but it shouldn’t be too late as long as your domain didn’t expire. Ask them to give you the DNS settings for your domain. You can take that and go to another host while keeping your domain. You won’t find a free web host that will allow you to use your domain unless you find an individual person who is willing to do this. Let me tell you a little about my experience with web hosting companies over the years. At times you will come across deals that are almost too good to be true – cheap web hosting with amazing features! There are hosts that while offering cheap prices do back that up with excellent performance and service, but there are things to be noted:

There are a lot of potential questions you must ask yourself, whilst bearing in mind other peoples reviews, their reputation, and ultimately – the price. I personally use http://www.top15hosting.com to read web hosting reviews and see what web host is getting the best reputation as well as the bad, which helps me decide who to stay away from.

Your experience might be different but I have many complaints from PowWeb and Dot5Hosting. Those companies just took my money and provided me with bad customer support and my websites would always be down. Today I use Just Host for my web hosting and I’m very satisfied. As long as you do a little research before buying your web hosting you will be fine.

How to Install WordPress Into Your Site ?

Nowadays people look out for methods that make their life simple, and thats normal because in this very busy world one would not like to waste time on simple things. Same thing with the website too.

There are lot of tools available in the market like website builders, readymade templates, flash scripts etc which will really make your job easy in building your website. WordPress is nothing different from these, it is also an publishing tool which will make you feel comfortable in maintaining your website.

WordPress is similar to blogger from google, but here we will have a option of installing wordpress in our own hosted domains rather than only under wordpress. It is a very usefull tool if your website is about articles, poems, short stories etc where you will have to put lot of text into your website.

First you need to install wordpress into your site, and the things you need for that is the wordpress package which is available at www.wordpress.org and a FTP client like Filezilla which is available at www.filezilla-project.org, both are available free of cost. And importantly you should have a hosting site which will provide you with minimum of one Database. If you have all this then you can install wordpress into your site.

In your hosting site you need to create a FTP account and also a Database. For both you need to give username and password, and you will also have to create a user for your database. In the wordpress package which is about 2.3MB, you will have to find a file by name wp-sample-config.php, open that file in any of the text editing tools like notepad or wordpad, in that there are several lines of PHP scripts, in which you will need to edit the following four lines,

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘your-database-name’)

define(’DB_USER’, ‘username’)

define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’)

define(’DB_HOST’, ‘database-server-name’)

In the above lines you will have to replace the your-database-name with the database name you created in your hosting site, username with the user you created for your database, password with the password you gave for your database and database-server-name with the name of the database server of your host. If you do not know the database server name, find it out from MySQL manager in your hosting site.

Once you have done this much rename the file as wp-config.php and save it. No its time to upload all the files inside the wordpress package into your host’s root directory, which will be usually /public-html/ . Use a FTP client like Filezilla for uploading all your files into your hosts directory. Please note that you will have to upload the files inside the wordpress package and not the whole package itself.

After uploading all the files into your host you will need to install wordpress into your site’s host and that is done by following instructions, type,

your-site-name/wp-admin/install.php

in your browsers address bar, if you have uploaded your files into right directory and entered the database information properly then you should be able to see a wordpress page saying, ‘wordpress installed’ and asking for your other details like name, e-mail, website name etc.

Once you have done with the above , you will get a mail which will contain the password using which you can log into wordpress dashboard. The username is always ‘admin’. Now enter the username and password and start posting your contents.

WordPress dashboard can be opened by using the following instruction,

your-site-name/wp-admin

By default wordpress will have two themes in it, you can install other themes into your wordpress by downloading the themes from other sites or from the wordpress website itself. The download package will be archived, you will need to extract it and upload the entire folder into wp-content/Themes folder into your hosts directory. If you want to install different plugins like visitor stats etc, then you will have to download the plugins and upload it into wp-content/Plugins folder of your host directory. Note that here also you will have to entire folder.