I had written in an earlier post, that I would document my entire experience of moving out of Blogger and into WordPress and building and customising this site. Well this post is part 1 of as many as it takes, to document this whole process. Hope it is helpful to anyone who wants to tread down the path I travelled!

Well for starters I needed to register a domain. I did a brief search and found this site and registered my domain (sabarish.net, which was thankfully still available) for Indian Rs. 399 a year. This site accepted payment through HDFC Netbanking so I was able to easily and instantly pay and register the domain. That was pretty much the standard rate across various domain registration sites, although some other sites give cheaper offers for registering a domain for longer periods of time (3 - 5 years or so).

After registering the domain, I needed to find some hosting space for the website. I found this site, which had quite a cheap offer (Rs. 500/year) for a linux hosting solution with 100 MB space and ulimited bandwidth. Once again I was able to use my netbanking and pay in INR. Ofcourse a day after I bought the hosting space - I got another hosting space from a cousin and I cancelled the hosting service which I had purchased. They had a 30 day refund policy so I got back my money! :)

After I registered the domain and got my hosting space, I needed to modify the domain settings to point to the new web host. For this I logged in at the domain registration site and specifically I had to update the “name server” with my new web host’s name servers.

The name servers look like this -

ns1.yourhost.com (192.168.0.1)

ns2.yourhost.com (192.168.0.2)

It should take anywhere between a few minutes to couple of hours to a day for the change in name server to happen.

You can read this for more info on the above steps.

Ok now my domain was setup, but there was still no content at the host, apart from one index.html file which said ’site under construction’ or something to that effect.

My main requirements were to firstly move my blog from blogger’s host to my own host and secondly I wanted to have a complete integrated site with photos and archives and static pages and with the blog being only part of it.

I had quite a few options as mentioned and compared here and here for this. My cousin recommended WordPress for my requirements and I found that it was easy to configure for blogging and also to use as a Content Management System.

Once I had decided on WordPress (well it wasn’t too hard to decide actually!), I needed to install it and get it up and running. This surprisingly was a piece of cake! WordPress promises a 5 minute installation procedure and have a well documented process here, which I followed and sure enough within no time it had been installed!

That’s all for this post. In the next I shall describe how I went about exporting my Blogger account to WordPress and configuring WordPress as per my needs.