In 2003, Mike Kittle 1 and Matt Mullenweg 2 created a fork of b2/cafelog and started the work on a free and open-sourced program that over 43% of the internet uses today to host their own websites: you may know it as WordPress. Twenty years later, the duo are working on completely different projects 3 , but WordPress remains completely free and open-sourced for all to use. the purpose of this article is to show you, dear reader (or podcast listener) how I setup my website, while also giving you the knowledge and tools to do the same.
IMPORTANT TO NOTE !!!
While WordPress is a completely free program and does not require any money to use or install, hosting the program online does cost A VARIABLE AMOUNT OF MONEY unless you are self-hosting from your own NAS OR HOME SERVER (AND, HONESTLY, IF YOU’RE SELF-HOSTING YOUR OWN WORDPRESS SITE, YOU PROBABLY DON’T NEED MY HELP ANYWAY).
A. Purchasing Your Own Domain from a Domain Registrar
In the last blog entry, i spoke about purchasing my own domain from [redacted registrar name here], but outside of that location: i usually recommend my personal friends and family purchase and manage their domains through porkbun because they just offer a better non-technical experience than other domain registrars like Squarespace 4 or network solutions .
the only alternative registrars i REALLY love is almost exclusively cloudflare, which really isn’t as user-friendly as porkbun, but icann also keeps a listing of accredited registrars if you’d like to research your own options.
B. Self-Hosting Your WordPress site
In the interest of being totally transparent, I will reiterate that the only way self-hosting WordPress is free is if you are personally self-hosting from your own NAS or home server, which is not what I will be outlining how to do or how to setup. If you’re interested in doing so (for free) and happen to want to look down the self-hosting rabbit hole, I highly recommend setting up your own Ubuntu server, following this linked guide, and starting the networking hell that is comprised of NAT rules and port forwarding 5 . Have fun. For literally everyone else that isn’t a tech masochist, we’re going to use a WordPress hosting site called hostinger to accomplish the same thing for insanely cheap; when I say “insanely cheap” i mean this is going to cost you around $50/year 6 . As a final final aside before we start the hosting site walk-through: there are a lot of WordPress hosting sites ( and I recommend really any of them except for DreamHost and WordPress.com 7 ), but you can always move your WordPress site using free backups and restores if the hosting provider you choose doesn’t work out!
Hostinger is ideal mostly for the ease-of-access that it allows while setting up a wordpress website. to get the best deal on your hosting, you’ll need to select the single web hosting deal which is only available after either creating an account or logging in. The video above shows the process i used after logging in to access the single web hosting plan, but (for podcast listeners) the process is:
- Select WEBSITES from the menu on the left hand side of the page.
- Select SINGLE WEB HOSTING for US$ 1.99/mo
- Select the duration for the plan. 8
- Pay for the plan using your choice of payment provider.
after hostinger has processed your payment, you’re immediately whisked into the next stage: setting up your actual website. there is a very nifty little series of prompts that’ll come up and, in order to make sure you have free reign of your website, you’ll want to follow these next instructions very closely. once again, i’ve included a video guide below showcasing my experience filling out the steps, but i encourage everyone (especially any podcast listeners) to follow along.
- Select SKIP in purple text at the bottom-right corner which is directly left to the NEXT button.
- Select CREATE A WEBSITE and press NEXT.
- Select WORDPRESS (Fully Customizable) and press NEXT.
- Enter an email address and password that you’d like to use to login to the admin portal for your website. Press NEXT.
- Select CREATE A BLANK SITE in purple text at the bottom-right corner, which is directly left to the NEXT button.
- Enter the domain name that you purchase from Porkbun
- Select DO YOU OWN THIS DOMAIN? USE IT and then press NEXT.
- Choose a server location for your website and then press NEXT. 9
- (Optional) Mouse-over PLUGINS on the left menu and select INSTALLED PLUGINS.
- (Optional) Deactivate the following plugins: Hostinger Easy Onboarding, Hostinger Reach, Hostinger Tools, LiteSpeed Cache. When deactivating LiteSpeed Cache, you do not need to provide a reason for deactivating and can just select the DEACTIVATE button on the bottom left.
- (Optional) Delete the following plugins: Hostinger Easy Onboarding, Hostinger Reach, Hostinger Tools, LiteSpeed Cache.
- Select SETTINGS on the left menu.
- Enter a SITE TITLE and TAGLINE for your website.
- (Optional) Upload a SITE ICON.
- Change ADMINISTRATION EMAIL ADDRESS to an email address that you own.
Guess what. Your website is literally almost done; just one more simple thing we need to do… 10
C. Pointing Your Domain’s DNS to Your Website
You’re probably exhausted from all the steps so far, and i promise this one is the absolute last one to make your new WordPress website live on the internet. unfortunately, it also happens to be the most dangerous step so far. If you bought your domain in step one and didn’t have an existing domain, this step isn’t that bad, but if you happened to be using an old domain and currently have it setup for something like email or another website, this step could break that if done incorrectly. (you can always contact me for personalized support, btw.)
when in doubt, just stop and don’t move forward.
- LOGIN to Hostinger.
- Select MANAGE under the SINGLE WEB HOSTING section for your domain.
- Select DOMAIN (Action Required).
- Above the YouTube video, select A RECORD in purple text.
- Open Porkbun in another tab and navigate to the DOMAIN MANAGEMENT page.
- Select the drop-down for DETAILS under your domain.
- Select DNS RECORDS.
- (IMPORTANT) SCROLL DOWN AND SCREENSHOT ALL THE TYPES, HOST, ANSWER, TTL, AND PRIORITY ITEMS UNDER CURRENT RECORDS.
- (IMPORTANT) SAVE THAT SCREENSHOT SOMEWHERE SAFE IN CASE ANYTHING GOES WRONG!
- (Optional) Delete the ALIAS record with the answer
uixie.porkbun.com - (Optional) Delete the CNAME record with the answer
uixie.porkbun.com - Scroll up to the top of the window and make sure the TYPE of A – Address record is selected.
- Copy the information from Hostinger into the proper Porkbun prompts.
- (Hostinger) NAME = (Porkbun) HOST
- (Hostinger) POINT TO = (Porkbun) ANSWER / VALUE
- (Hostinger) TTL = (Porkbun) TTL
- Under the NOTES prompt on Porkbun, input
Hostinger DNS - Press ADD.
- Repeat Steps 12-15 for the second A Record Entry on Hostinger.
- Go back to Hostinger and check the box next to I’VE CHANGED THE A RECORDS.
The propagation of dns can take anywhere from 24-72 hours to finish, but porkbun is pretty fast about propagating, so it may be done in a few minutes. you should be able to go to www.yourdomainnamehere.com and see it online now! i promise, the scariest stuff is now officially behind us. congratulations!
by the way, you can now login to the admin portal of your website by typing in www.yourdomainnamehere.com/wp-admin and logging in using the administration email address that you setup earlier.
D. Customizing WordPress Into a Newsletter
because WordPress as a tool has been around for a few decades now, there are tons of free themes and plugins that you can use on your site to make your own newsletter. the first plugin i always recommend for this purpose, and my personal favorite, is the newsletter plugin. you can use this with really any theme you like to make subscription easy and the free version of this plugin works super well out of the box.
one of the only issues i’ve run into with sending emails via WordPress is having those subscription emails getting stuck in the spam filter. the fix for that is a combination of other free tools:
- fluentsmtp
- a free wordpress plugin that allows you to adjust your email settings for WordPress
- SMTP2GO
- an email sender that integrates directly with FluentSMTP
- allows you to send 1,000 emails FOR FREE a month (which will be fine for most creators) or larger amounts like 10,000 emails a month for $15/month (for super large scale creators)
- there ARE variable monetary amounts, of course
if you are one of those people who likes getting money from subscriptions for your newsletters, you can also look into setting up direct paypal or stripe donations using the free accept donations with paypal & stripe plugin. while companies like medium or substack take a certain percentage of your subscriptions to pay for their services, this plugin allows you to work directly with paypal/stripe themselves and doesn’t take a cut of your money meaning: you get to keep all the money you make !! 11
i know this post is about newsletters, but i talked about autoblue last blog entry and will remind readers/listeners that i still think this tool is amazing for non-email integration.
if you’re looking from wordpress to discord, or from wordpress to another platform integration: the integration probably already exists, you just need to search for it!
You’re All Done !! (Hopefully)
everything i outlined in this article is exactly how i plan to build out my own newsletter, so if you run into issues with this setup: I’ve probably already run into them and solved them, which is why I’m happy to help people with this process especially if they contact me directly !! 12 i truly believe that scalable options like wordpress are one of the only ways creators like me will be able to thrive on the internet and praxis demands that i share information like this for others too.
- Check out Mike Little’s Wikipedia Entry and/or Personal Website if you haven’t had your dose of Black History today ↩︎
- Matt Mullenweg’s Personal Website ↩︎
- As of November 1st, 2025: Little is working at Altis, an enterprise WordPress hosting company, and Mullenweg runs Automattic, also known as the company that runs the for-profit side of WordPress (and yes, WordPress.COM is different FROM WordPress.ORG) ↩︎
- I literally do not have a single positive thing to say about Squarespace and my only word of advice is transferring off that registrar WHENEVER YOU CAN. ↩︎
- If either of those terms are foreign to you, you should probably not be setting up a web server from your own home for purely security reasons. Not trying to be rude, but I literally have my website hosted outside of my own home for this exact reason. There are a lot of bad people out there who are looking for people that open up virtual paths to their home network and you really don’t want to give them any fuel to find you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. ↩︎
- Hostinger does a bunch of promotions the first time you setup a domain, so if you can afford to get a website for longer than a month at a time, I recommend doing so; it’ll let you lock-in for like $2/month for 2 years, which is the best price on the market (to my knowledge). ↩︎
- wordpress.com charges like $20/month just for the ability to use plugins, which is a free feature when you install WordPress on most other self-hosted sites. They do this to force people who don’t know any better to pay more, which is pretty shitty. ↩︎
- If you can afford it, getting a longer deal is ideal because it allows you to lock in at a very, very low price for longer. In this example, I went with a 12 month (or 1 year) deal. ↩︎
- I usually use European locations for this; not because of speed or lag, but because European data servers are subject to stricter data protection laws so sites hosted here tend to be safer from certain oversight ↩︎
- I am so sorry: this is not simple at all. DNS is arguably one of the most annoying and confusing things on the Internet; literally any IT or Networking technician will tell you that, but I’M here to make it very simple for you…hopefully… ↩︎
- Just make sure to keep enough for the taxes that you need to pay back at the end of the year. Uncle Sam will come for you otherwise lmao. ↩︎
- As long as my schedule has free time, I’ll try my best. No guarantees! ↩︎
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🥲😮💨 I am a tech masochist I do want to one day learn how to set up my own home server and self host my website. The only thing between me and that dream is unemployment aka money. But one day.
i REAAAAALLY wanted to make a guide showing people how to self-host using their own servers, but couldn’t do it in good conscious knowing that it would open compromise paths for most people after i finish testing variable security exploits, i’ll make a follow-up showing how to setup a home server
If messing around with your own dns hasn’t made you cry at least 3 times this week maybe don’t get into self hosting? Also don’t get into self hosting because you want to save your family from streaming services and think “how hard could it be?”
I once briefly in a fit of peek madness started looking into self hosting my website, to building a homelab server, to can I be my own ISP? Before a friend in cyber security talked me down. It’s a cursed rabbit hole.
so basically, what you’re saying is: we’re the same person what’s good, twin ?!
*insert Pink Pantheress Illegal meme here* Lol, why are we like this??
Wordpress also has plugins that let you connect your blog to ActivityPub. They’re not perfect, but they will let people see and comment on your posts from Mastodon.
yup !! because wordpress is an activepub product it AUTOMATICALLY INTEGRATES WITH MASTODON !! this plugin actually allows you turns your website into its own federated instance so people can follow each blog post on the fediverse !! wordpress.org/plugins/acti…
As always, any comments under this post will be linked to my website using the #AutoBlue plugin by @danielpost.com
in classic sharpie fashion, i hyperfocused and finished this before the end of the year !! 😇
will be working on a video tutorial outlining this article next probably will not finish it before the end of this year tho, as a head’s up 🥲
Wordpress is DOPE—I used it a WHILE ago. Think it’s time to go back to that.
It’s a good point. I use Wordpress for my personal website and Buttondown for my newsletter. Medium is for the long nerdy articles
i was going to note buttondown as a newsletter plugin option for users, but noticed they’ve been racking up their prices lately, so i didn’t want to include them for that fact i think they’re a good option for most people who have the monetary means for sure, but SMTP2Go offers free sending rn
awesome. I also use mailpoet off my own website for newletters. Slightly more techie but not bad.
ohhh, i’mma have to look into that !! thanks for the recommendation !!
wordpress off my own URL. some handcoding html on my books because series get weird, but Mooberry Dreams handles that for most writers. Redirects over to the corporate webstore with all the buy links plus a shopify site. My wife might be nerdier than you. possibly. 😁
love to hear about other women and fems in STEM we’re are the best kept secret in tech tbh 🤭
she was a top-level tech writer at Salesforce in the old days. and published out of NewYork for her first three books. I kinda won the lottery twice in finding wives.