Setting up WordPress on my GoDaddy account was more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be. I figured it would be a good place to start this blog.
1. So first, you have to get yourself set up with GoDaddy. I chose the Linux economy plan for 4.29/month. After you go throught the Account Set-up wizard, it will tell you the status is “Pending” for a bit, and then after a few minutes, it will change to “Setup”.
2. Click on the “Open” link under Control Panel on the Web Hosting Accounts.
3. In the Hosting Control Center, click on Databases, then MySQL.
4. Click the “Create Database” button, and then fill out the fields, taking note of the database name and password that you supply.
5. The status on the Database page will say Pending for a bit, and then change to Setup. Click the Open Manager Link that appears.
6. Log in to the manager page that comes up with the username and password that you supplied in Step 4.
7. Click on the “Databases” link, then take note of the IP address that appears near the top of the page. It will look something like “Server: 10.x.x.x”.
8. Download the WordPress files from the site, extract them, and then rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php.
9. Open the wp-config.php file with a text editor. Change the lines that look like:
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
On the fourth line, it says you probably won’t have to change it, but you actually need to set it to the IP address that we got in Step 7.
10. Upload (FTP) the WordPress source files with the modified wp-config.php file to your account. Filezilla is a good open source FTP package. If you want the blog to appear at the root of your site, ie. http://yoursite.com, just copy the files to the root. If you want it to be in another directory, ie. http://yoursite.com/blog, you need to create it in your FTP client and then copy the files to that directory.
11. Now you just need to open a browser window and point it to: http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/install.php (or wherever you copied the files).
12. If all went as expected, you will be asked a few questions to set up your new blog. If something is not right, it will tell you in a fairly specific way.
