Undoubtedly WordPress is the most powerful and easy to use website creation tool and content management system. Many individuals, small businesses, famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, even Fortune 500 companies and celebrities are using WordPress. It can be installed on a web server with the PHP and MySQL support. For individuals and startups, you may choose to setup WordPress on a shared server which costs around $10/month. Most small business owners prefer VPS server which is noticeably faster than shared hosting. With VPS hosting, you get better performance and more control at the same time. It is because you do not share the CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth and other resources with other people when you are on a VPS server. Today, we will show you two ways you can create a site on VPS server using WordPress, the most popular, free and open-source CMS. We will use Bluehost low cost & high performance VPS hosting server in the demo, which makes it extremely easy to get your WordPress website up and running with their free 1-click auto installer. And you get a free domain name too.
Create a WordPress site on VPS server automatically
cPanel is provided by default. You can use this user friendly hosting control panel to setup and manage your websites. Log on to your VPS server, click cPanel from the top menu bar, scroll down to the Website section. See below screenshot.
Click Install WordPress, you will be taken to the “Install WordPress for FREE” quick installation page. Click Install WordPress button, then select a domain and installation path or folder for your WordPress site, type in your email account for admin purpose, type in your site title, admin username, and finally click Install WordPress button to setup the WordPress site on your VPS server automatically.
Get domain for your WordPress site
As we mentioned at the first paragraph, you can get a domain for free. If you already have a domain, follow these steps to add the domain name to your VPS server.
Build your website using WordPress
You can log on the dashboard of WordPress site to get started. When you finish installed the WordPress site, which usually take 1 or 2 minutes, you will get the notification at the page top with your site login credentials and the admin URL. Meanwhile an email with your WordPress login information will be sent to your email account.
Install WordPress on VPS server manually
WordPress is well-known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances, the process takes less than five minutes. WordPress requires PHP and MySQL database. If you choose to manually configure WordPress on server, you will need to create a database for it first, modify a configuration file, then start the installation.
Step 1. Create a database for WordPress
cPanel has the built-in database manager which can help you setup a MySQL database on VPS server easily.
Step 2. Create database connection
Download the latest stable release of WordPress web installer from https://wordpress.org/latest.zip. Upload it to your server. See how you can easily upload files to VPS server here. Make sure upload WordPress to the folder your domain name is mapped to. For example, if your domain points to the root directory, upload WordPress to the root. In cPanel, go to Files >> File Manager.
Find and unzip the WordPress installation package. Rename the ‘wp-config-sample.php‘ file to ‘wp-config.php‘, then open this file online to create a connection between the front page and the database as the end.
Enter your database name where it says “database_name_here”; enter your database username and password which is used to access your database in the “username_here” and “password_here” individually. Save the change and close the configuration file in File Manager.
Step 3. Finish setting up WordPress site from web browser
Now access http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php (replace yourdomain.com with your real domain name) from you web browser to pull up the installation page. Fill in necessary information as prompt to finish setting up WordPress site from web browser. Just like how the auto-installation works above.
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