A Free Personal WordPress Blog Solution

If you want to have a wordpress blog for FREE co.cc + x10hosting is the best choice. I will introduce both in this post.

I will briefly introduce how to set up a wordpress blog like my blog. The overall that I paid for this blog is only $0.89. I can say that it is nearly free. And the 5G traffic is enough for my blog. There are many free blog service providers such as wordpress.com and blogger. But I prefer to set up it by myself because I can control the domain name, the program and the content of my site and I can bakup the site very easily.

1. Domain registration:

Ff you do not want to pay for the domain you can also get a CO.CC domain for FREE from www.co.cc. You will have full dns or forwarding control of the co.cc domain you have. Dns server, CNAME, MX record, forwarding are all available. They provides an easy configuration choice for google application.

I register my domain at the low price of $0.89 from GoDaddy.com .info domain is very cheap for registration. And the annual renew fee is $7.9. If the .com domain is more convenient, you can register one at the price about $10/year.

2. Hosting service:

I am now using hostso’s HK$48/y plan. I decide to pay for a good hosting service to host my blog. With a hosting service that I pay I can get a better service.

If a free hosting service is needed, I still give my recommendations:

When considering the free hosting service, I have several rules:
* It should have some way for earning money. I don’t like to see that my site disappear because the site runs out of their money.
* It should provides PHP + MySQL solution. I mainly using WordPress.
* It should allow ad-free. I don’t like to have a big banner on top or at the bottom of my site.
* It should have a good availability rate and performance.
* It will be better if my friends in China can also browse the site on there servers.

x10Hosting.com is the best free hosting service I have ever found. My blog is was running on their servers now. Their service can fulfil all my requirements listed above ;) . They provides 500MB disk space 10G bandwidth and 3 MySQL database, which is far enough for my personal blog. They provides .htaccess support and FTP account. And what’s best is that my friends in China can also browse my blog directly now. Their control panel and web design are much professional, I like it very much. Compared to the other free hosting service, I highly recommend x10hosting. But if you think you are going to need much more disk space and bandwidth, I suggest getting at least a shared hosting or better yet a dedicated server.

Before x10hosting, I used the free hosting plan of freehostia.com. I don’t recommend the service of 000webhost.com now even they offer a “1500 MB Disk Space, 100 GB Data Transfer” plan at the price of $0.00. I like the 000webhost’s service plan and the user interface better. But it seems they don’t accept new application now. I thought I wouldn’t spend time on transferring my site because their free 5G traffic plan is enough for me. If more disk space or traffic is needed for your site, you can consider the paid service plan. But the x10hosting’s service is good enough for persuading me to transfer ;)

So, with overall fee of $0.89, I get a personal blog. And I thank the guys that make wordpress and it’s useful plugins available to us for free! WordPress is my favourite blog. I can choose any theme that I like and the most beautiful thing is that there are all kinds of plugins ready for using!

The theme and plugins I ever used are:
Theme: iBlog2 (A MacOS X style theme)
Plugins: Akismet (Anti spam), All in One SEO Pack (SEO plugin), KB Robots.txt (Edit robots.txt file), Sociable (Add share and enjoy), WP Super Cache (Save CPU usage of the server), Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (Recommend related posts).