Blog setup – tedious the second time

Setting up your own blog is a pain in the ass. At best, it’ll take several hours, even if you know what you’re doing and you’ve used the services before. For my sins, I’ve now done this twice, several years apart. It wasn’t as confusing the second time around but it’s still not nearly as straightforward as the internet would have you believe. For the benefit of anyone else who may want to set up their own blog in 2024, and whilst it’s fresh in my mind, I’m going to lay out the basic steps I went through here.

Before we start

I’m going to presume a couple of things:

1) You want to own your own/a custom domain. Troy Hunt explained why this is a good idea in a blog post years ago. I’m not going to rewrite it. I agree with his post. Read it here.

2) You want the setup to be as easy as possible. So did I. I don’t love HTML or CSS (yes yes, I know I’m (re)learning to code) or setting up server hosts from scratch. I’m a rubbish designer, so show me the nice (free) templates.

3) You don’t want to spend crazy money (okay, on this you may be SOL if the domain you want is already taken – that’s a whole other topic of conversation).

The process

The overall process looks like this:

These 8 steps, excluding the content side, took me around 12 hours this time. Here are some of the choices I made:

1) I owned the domain already, but if you’re starting from scratch you’ll need to buy from scratch. I strongly recommend keeping your domain purchase separate from your hosting purchase. The domain is the valuable thing. The site can be restored or recreated. If you want to buy a domain, Cloudflare or porkbun, would be my go-to. Good pricing, good renewal pricing and none of the issues that a registrar/host like GoDaddy has. I’ve used GoDaddy for multiple clients previously, and it’s got one of the most user-unfriendly backends I’ve used. And they’re expensive AF. So I’d suggest staying away.

2) I went with BlueHost for the web hosting. They’re far from the greatest (the upselling, oh my god the UNENDING upselling) but I got a competitive price for one year of hosting thanks to a new year sale. And their website builder is reasonably intuitive, based on what I’ve read, and now what I’ve experienced. But at the end of one year, I’ll likely backup my site and migrate it to another hosting firm like Cloudways or Hostinger. If you’re entirely opposed to using any business owned by EIG (BlueHost is owned by them), I do not blame you. I’d choose Hostinger in that case. Porkbun also offers hosting, but I’ve not yet tested them myself, so proceed at your own risk.

3) I designed a new logo for the new blog. And by designed, I mean I inputted a prompt into ChatGPT for DALL-E to generate a logo. After multiple efforts, I’m deeply unconvinced by the DALL-E experience via ChatGPT (it straight up ignores various instructions in prompts), but for these purposes it was quick and easy and I don’t have fancy requirements. I will experiment more with DALL-E/2/3 at some point and see if I’m just crap at prompt writing (highly likely) or if DALL-E is just not that great (also possible). You might have better luck with it since you’re probably a better prompt writer (no, you are not a prompt ‘engineer’…) than I am.

4) BlueHost will want to install many many plugins for you. I mostly don’t bother with their suggested ones. What I do install are Really Simple SSL (for activating SSL and managing the Lets Encrypt certificate, as well as testing security headers), JetPack (uptime monitoring, newsletter management, social integration), UpdraftPlus (backing up/restoring my site) and YoastSEO. I’m a filthy freebooter and I don’t pay for the premium versions of any of these. Don’t feel any pressure to either, unless you have a specific need for the advanced versions. My needs are rather simple, so I don’t.

5) Your host may offer to keep your WordPress install automatically updated. You should definitely enable this. It may break/stop your plugins working if there’s a major version update but all the major plugins seem excellent at managing this. I didn’t have an issue in three years of my previous blog.

Future updates

Okay, that’s pretty much it on a high level. There’s stuff I haven’t covered (e.g., manually setting security headers on your site, setting up your own admin account, configuring stuff like CloudFlare, etc.), but in keeping with my commitment to write shorter blog posts I’m going to leave it there for now. If you have something you want me to answer (e.g. how I manage email for the site, or how to get your custom domain working with your host), feel free to leave a comment and I’ll either reply or – if a comment won’t cut it – write a post on it. Inevitably, I’m going to make tweaks to the site. If they make a meaningful difference to the experience, I’ll probably also give them a write-up.