Wordpress Hosting

This page: wordpress-hosting.php was last updated: April 20 2008 10:07:46.

Our standard Hosting Plans include Wordpress support allowing you to join the Blogosphere today. Share your thoughts, opinions, idea's on line with your friends, family, and the rest of world. With your own domain name and an independenly hosted blog, you are able take advantage of the growing number of Wordpress templates and plugins. Increasingly the Wordpress "blog" engine makes an ideal content management system, for the personal, business or ecommerce website.

Wordpress represents online blogging made easy. Wordpress is probably the most comprehensive, and "search engine friendly" blog engine you can find. Create a daily diary, post regular news about your products, business, niche or speciality. Or just give your opinions and grumble about the world in general! No HTML or site development skills required.

Wordpress has a simple interface for novice bloggers and an exceptional suite of features to please the experienced blogger. Whats more Wordpress can be pre-installed into your Weycrest Hosting Space with just one click from our online Plesk or Cpanel Control Panel.

• No rebuilding - changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately
• Wordpress Pages - allowing you to manage non-blog content easily, for example a "About You" page
• WordPress Themes - full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake
• WordPress Links - create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface

In addition to our Blog Hosting Service all our hosting plans offer a huge amount of webspace to publish a very comprehensive site with space for audio blogs, and podcasts. Keep in touch when you are on the move with Webmail support which comes as standard on all web hosting plans. For those wanting more than image hosting, here is a comprehensive list of features below.

You can make payment by credit or debit card using Paypal, without being a Paypal member. Alternatively payment can be made by cheque or postal order. A VAT invoice is automatically raised for service, which you can view, download or print at any time with our online billing system. All prices exclude VAT @ 17.5%.

What is a Blog?

Blog means a "Web Log." A Blog is really on online journal. They are fairly similar to web forums except that a blog is an individual journal and a web forum is more of an interaction between many like minded individuals.

Is it hard to start a blog? Do you have to be a bit of a Geek to maintain a Blog?

Not at all it's all very simple. The software can be pre-installed by Weycrest and the popular blogging tools are very user friendly. Every day, there are lots of new bloggers. Indeed once your favourite blog is installed, the main task is to create content for your blog. Standard hosting usually requires some HTML skills in putting togethor a website. With blogging you are freed from that.

Can I use my Weycrest webspace in conjunction with Google's Blogger?

Absolutely. Signup for Google Blogger here. Choose "Advanced Blog Setup" and give Google your FTP username and password, Blog URL and FTP path, all of which are provided in your Weycrest hosting setup email. Blogger is a good introduction to the world of blogging but lacks some of the advanced features of the more popular blog tools. You may want to install Google Blogger in a sub directory or create a subdomain (ie: myblog.yourdomain.com) if you already have a website installed in your hosting space (or at least in a seperate directory).

How much does it cost money to start a blog?

It depends. There are several established sites that can set you up a free blog. These are blogeasy.com, weblogs.us, blogsource.com, blogstream.com, bloxter.net, blogsky.com, blogger.com, amongst others. The problem with free blog host space is that they have no contractual obligation to you and they can remove your blog at any time.

Can I install blog software in existing hosting space?

Of course if you already have hosting and a domain name, this might be the cheapest and most reliable way of starting a blog. Most blog scripts require PHP and often a MySQL database. Some blog software such as MT (moveable type) require additional perl modules, but these are already installed onto Weycrest servers

Can I make money out of my blog?

Yes. Though this isn't the main motivation of many personal bloggers it is possible to monetize your blog. This can be achieved by incorporating a google adsense campaign into your blog (easily done - just cut and paste the javascript code provided by Google into your site) or by writing about a service or product and including affilate text links in your writing. Embedded text links can produce the most response. With these methods its relatively easy to recoup your hosting costs.

How do I promote my blog? Whats all this "pinging" business?

There are a number of services you can ping when you update your blog though trackback posting is more productive. More frequent posting will increase traffic as the search engine spiders will crawl and index your blog more often.

Additional promotion and syndication methods include RSS feeds and submitting to Blog Directories and by exchanging links with other bloggers. Google's Blogger only produces and atom feed, but this can be processed at feedburner.com (which is a free service) to produce a valid RSS 2.0 feed. This is also the RSS standard for podcasting. Your RSS feed can then be validated at feedvalidator.org.

What is Podcasting?

Podcasting is a combination of the terms "ipod" and "broadcasting." Though infact you can create and listen to a podcast without the need for an ipod device. Podcasts can be retrieved using a standard web browser or podcast client software such as Podcast Amp. Listen to podcasts using standard media or audio software (Real Player, Windows Media Player, or Winamp) or transfer them to an mp3 player.

Creating a podcast is easy. It requires a PC or laptop with a microphone. Firstly record and edit your podcast with audio editor and recorder software. Audacity is free software and support's Windows, Linux and Mac OSX operating systems and can be found at http://audacity.sourceforge.net. Upload your podcast to your Weycrest blogspace and distribute it via your blogger software's RSS feed. Also submit your audio blog site to the various Podcast Directories.

What are Splogs?

These are Spam Blogs. This is another problem for the free blog sites especially if they have an automated setup. Spammers create literally thousands of "spam blogs" on free networks containing hundreds of links to fool search engines and to artificially create advertising and affiliate revenue.

This can put the free blog networks and servers (as well as their support staff) under some stress. Worse than that, if someone accidentally or maliciously flags your legitimate blog as a "splog" if might suddenly be deleted. It's also possible that search engines might rank your blog lower for being in a "bad neighbourhood." This can happen to networks offering mass free hosting too.

Weycrest, established 1999 to offer fast, friendly web hosting services for bloggers, developers, photographers, bands, clubs, artists and other creative types. We also offer business, corporate and ecommerce hosting and strive to offer a rapid and personal support service that larger internet providers simply can't provide.

If you have any questions you can email our sales team at sales@weycrest.com