How to Host Your WordPress Site on Godaddy – Step-by-Step Instructions

If you’re looking for hosting that’s easy and cheap, then you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we will show you how to host your WordPress site on Godaddy, a popular web host that costs just $2.95 per month.

Get A Premium Account

As the name suggests, this host offers premium services for a lower cost. You don’t need to have a premium account to host a WordPress site on Godaddy, but it will make things a lot simpler. To get started, visit this link and click on the orange button to reveal more details.

You’ll see that you can either choose a free community account or a premium account. The premium account will give you access to all the features, except two. One is the option to choose a different domain name than your site’s IP address and the other is the spam protection.

Install WordPress

As mentioned above, you don’t need a premium account to install WordPress on Godaddy. To do that, visit this link and click on the orange button to reveal more details. Once again, you’ll see two options: free and paid.

If you choose paid, then the installation will be quick and painless. Otherwise, it’ll take a while.

Set Up The Admin Area

When you have WordPress installed on your host, you’ll see a small bar on the top left of the screen. Just click on that and you’ll see the dashboard. That’s what we called the admin area in this case. It’s where all the actions take place. From here, you can manage a WordPress site in many ways.

Visit The DNS Manager

The DNS manager is like the phone book for the internet. When you enter the DNS manager, you’ll be asked to enter the domain you want to manage. In this case, we have ‘thehowship.com’.

You can either enter the domain name you want to manage or use the search bar to find the domain you want. Once you found it, click on the orange button to the right side of the domain name to reveal more options. You’ll see a green tick next to the DNS records. That’s what you need to confirm.

You can enter the name of the person(s) you want to manage the account with or create a group for users to collaborate. You’ll need at least two people to create an account. To get started, click on the Create New User button.

You’ll then be prompted to enter a username, a password, and to confirm the password. Don’t worry, we’ll discuss this later. Once you created a new user account, you can click on the Edit button to the right of the username to reveal more options. From here, you can go back to the dashboard to manage the site’s content.

Configure The Database

To make things easier, we’ll use our previous example (thehowship.com). When you get to the dashboard, you’ll see a tab for Databases. Click on that and you’ll see all the databases that WordPress uses by default.

As a WordPress user, you’ll most probably already have a database with your username and password. In most cases, you don’t need to change the details here. Just make sure that the server the database is hosted on is online and accessible from everywhere. In this case, we will use an external database server that’s hosted by 1&1. That way, we can ensure that our WordPress site will always be available.

Activate The Spam Filters

The last step in this guide is to activate the anti-spam filters. To do that, click on the Spam Filters link on the left side of the dashboard. The next screen will ask you to confirm that you want to activate the filters.

If you’re on the free community version of WordPress, then the spam filters are turned off by default. To get started, confirm that you want to activate them and click on the Activate button to the right of the message. Now, you can send out any amount of emails and don’t have to worry about spam checks. Just remember that the filters are still on and that you have to confirm emails from unknown sources.

That’s It

Finally, don’t forget to check the box to the left of the URL to make sure that it’s active. That way, you won’t have to enter the URL every time you want to visit a post. Just remember that if you don’t do that, then the posts will still be there, but you won’t be able to see them because the CMS will think they’ve been deleted. Check the box to the left of the URL and it’ll show that the post has been published successfully. Now, you can go back to the dashboard to check out your work.