Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
How to Host Your Own Blog in 5 Minutes for $10 a Year
A few weeks ago, I just happened on a really cheap hosting company called NearlyFreeSpeech and nearly free is right. To host the average WordPress blog, it will cost you about 2 cents a day. Beat that GoDaddy. There is no billing. You fill your account up and you get that amount of hosting. $10 may last you longer than a year. I threw $5 in my account just to play around. It should last me until the end of summer and I have 8 domains there I am setting up. As they get traffic, I will move them away to VPS hosting for more power, but for now it works and it is very low cost.
NearlyFreeSpeech has some idiosyncrasies like you can’t set up cron jobs. But you do get SSH access to your accounts and that is about all you get. No Fantastico. No One Click Installs.
I had been doing a lot of SSH work lately installing Magento sites, so I figured I could find out a way to speed up the process for WordPress. I made a video which I will break down here first because it does not have the first three steps:
- Get a NearlyFreeSpeech account
Bugs, Viruses, Backups, and prevedvsem123.cn
Updated: A Note Before You Read On
I don’t know the source of this virus currently. All I know is that everyone I have talked to so far that has this issue has been on a Layered Tech box, either directly, in the case of Woopra or through resellers. I have not found any other information of it effecting other hosting providers yet.
But I am only stating what I know to be true and trying to help people stop it on their own because god knows that these support desks are going to have their hands fulls.
Finally Every WordPress Installation Current
And it was a mother. This was why I wait so long to update.
First, I made sure that all my plugins were current, but it turns out that this new version of WordPress is a big change and it really didn’t matter if they were current because a lot were not going to work.
Alinks
This is a plugin I had on every installation of WordPress. And I am tired of messing with it to make it work with WordPress 2.6.1 or the theme at Digital Products Review. I am not really sure which it is, but I am done for a while. But when I turn it on, my homepage looks like the picture on the right. It did nothing to the other pages on the site.
Experiencing Technical Difficulties
Right now, for some reason, I can’t access my WordPress admin. Well, I can. In one way. I can click around on the top menu. The thing is that, nothing appears below as I do this.
The cause: rebuilding my PHP install to add new modules.
The solution: I have no clue until I start sniffing around a bit.
Troubleshooting route:
- Upgrading my WordPress installation to the latest version and hope for the best. This worked once for an issue I was having and I didn’t ask any questions. And it needs this anyway.
A Random Walk Through WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins don’t stop coming. My initial idea with this blog was to build a set of plugins and then once I thought I was set, download the plugin folder and use it for my other blogs. But, like I said, the cool plugins keep on coming.
So today I took a random walk though the WordPress plugin repository just to see what’s up. No search terms. Just some browsing. And here are some cool plugins I found.
A complex ad serving and content plugin. It supports ad-rotation, scheduling, and works with widgets.
The Ultimate DoFollow Blog List
I figured I had to go over the top with this one. Not quite sure if I have. You tell me.
I have been using Fast Blog Finder to find dofollow blog posts for me. It helps and then it doesn’t. I don’t spam. I like getting beneficial links back to my site. I use tools like this because they simplify the process. But sometimes the posts are a little bit old. And I am not quite sure of the etiquette involved. Is an older post OK to comment on? I could see refering to it from a blog post. But after a post has 20 comments, how much do you really add to the conversation if it has ended? Read more... (469 words, 3 images, estimated 1:53 mins reading time)