Everyone with a self-hosted blog needs a place for their blog to "live" on the Internet. With our blog business, we get a lot of questions about what web hosting service we use for our Wordpress blogs. I recommend the excellent Wordpress package with Lunarpages. They've been very reliable; we just renewed recently, in fact. The yearly price is reasonable and Lunarpages gives good service.

I'm assuming here that you wish to use Wordpress.ORG for your blog, instead of Wordpress.COM, Blogger, or something else that does the hosting for you. See NOTE below.

How to get your Wordpress blog hosted on Lunarpages

Once you have your domain name purchased, and your blog concept ready to go, you need to find a place for your blog to "be" in cyberspace. This is called hosting.

Here’s a link to Lunarpage's basic hosting package:
http://www.lunarpages.com/id/polygeekcom/goto/basic-hosting/

You can cut and paste that link to take you right there. Just sign up, pay and look at your options. To do Wordpress hosting you want the PHP package and, viola! That’s about it. That’s what we have. Easy.

Lunarpages has PLENTY of bandwidth with their plans. On some of our professional work, we serve a good bit of video and still don’t come close to using more that 10% of our monthly bandwidth. You'd have to have a very popular video blog, or hit the front page of Digg someday, to need something larger.

It's best not to worry about those kinds of happy problems when you are just getting started. :-)

Here’s an easy checklist that my web developer husband and I wrote up for ourselves to follow when setting up blogs with Lunarpages. Use this list after you have Wordpress installed and running:

* Download latest Wordpress files

* Create a new email address to act as the admin of your site

* Sign up for a Wordpress account - username only - so that you can get your API key

* Activate the Akismet Plugin

* Get a new theme - unless you like the default. If you don't know about themes yet, skip this step for now

* Add your RSS to Feedburner

* Get the Feedburner plugin installed

* Edit Blogroll by removing links Wordpress has pre-installed, and adding your own choices if you wish

* Add to Google Analytics

* Change permalink structure to: /%post_id%_%category%_%postname%

This will get your basic blog up, ready for you to upload your content. Other articles on this site will discuss every aspect mentioned above in detail; what Akismet, Feedburner, RSS, blogrolls and permalinks are...how to use Analytics, choosing themes, etc.

NOTE - you don't need to follow these steps at all, or worry about hosting your blog, if you use Blogger or Wordpress.com. These steps are for self-hosting your own blog, with your OWN DOMAIN, at Wordpress.org.

If this is confusing to you, feel free to leave questions or comments in the Blogs & Social Networking Forum here at BellaOnline. :-)