Hosting a Business Website with WordPress

Question:

Hi, I was planning to develop a website for my own small company which markets Herbal Products.

Initially I was planning on designing it on my own, getting a domain name and then hosting it with an external web hosting company.

However if I do the same with wordpress, I can get loads of free templates and I can host it for free. As i hardly need any Web space.

All I have to do is get a domain name and map it to this wordpress address.

Is it really that easy?? If it was why would anybody pay a hosting company. I know the website might look like a blog but I think I can customize it to look like a normal website.

Also when wordpress hosts your blog [ I mean the usual bog & not just any website ] for free, why do people use other paid hosting agencies. Anways you get to do the exact same stuff, with or without paying.

PS: I am not talking about the paid features from wordpress, but to host free features you get from wordpress from an external agency?

Thanks.

Answer:

WordPress.com may be free and you may not need much space, but you can’t do it for one single reason… they don’t allow ANY commercial content of ANY kind. You can’t sell anything, nor can you place advertising on your site. You can’t even use a WordPress.com blog as a bridge to point traffic to an external monetized site. They’ll suspended your blog in a heartbeat. It happens day in and day out to tons of people. It’s happened to me several times.

And to your “…why do people use other paid hosting agencies. Anways you get to do the exact same stuff, with or without paying.” Actually, no, you don’t. As if not being able to monetize your blog wasn’t enough, there are two more reason why WordPress.com is not the same as a self-hosted blog.

1. Themes – WordPress.com does NOT allow you to upload your own themes.
2. Plugins – WordPress.com does NOT allow you to upload plugins.

Therefore, if you find a really cool theme online, paid for or free, you can’t use it on a WordPress.com blog. It doesn’t matter HOW cool it looks or how PERFECT it is for your blog, forgettaboutit!

Plugins, ah, plugins, those magical snippets of code that do amazing things like block spam, automatically turn certain keywords into hyperlinks without hand coding them, caching to make your pages and post load faster, automatic sitemap generation for the search engines, search engine optimization (SEO) to make sure you blog gets found by others searching for your content, secured form mailers for a Contact Us page or other forms when you need to gather user input without the malicious code that some hackers try to slip in, ping optimizers to let blog aggregators know that you made a post, inserting helpful YouTube videos, database backup managers, image sliders on your homepage and on and on and on. If you have a specific function, there’s prolly a plugin for it or you can have a custom one built.

That’s some pretty powerful stuff, so no, WordPress.com is NOT the same as a self hosted blog.

Get A Cheap Domain Name

First, get a domain name from NameCheap. A lot of hosts will get you a free domain name with a hosting account purchase, but I do not recommend doing that. Click here to read about free domain names.

Get Good  WordPress Hosting

You said you’re going to market herbal products. Are you a distributor for an herbal product company? Multi-level marketing (MLM)? If so, be careful and check your terms of service with the company on how you’re allowed to market their products so you don’t spend time building a cool blog and then get told you’re violating the TOS for copyright infringement. I see it happen all the time with MLM companies.

That being said, a WordPress blog is PERFECT for marketing and people who are interested in your products LOVE original content. Don’t copy and paste stuff. People don’t want to read about how successful the company is, they want to know what those products can do for them. Make blog posts about products that you use, yourself. Talk about home parties you’ve held. Introduce new products. With that secure form mailer plugin I mentioned above, you can capture your own leads. There’s so much you can do with a blog. My point is, if you market it properly, you’re blog will develop into something GREAT so do it correctly right from the start with good WordPress hosting. I have two recommendations for WordPress hosting.

1. WebHostingHub – This is the PRIMO SUPREME of all web hosts for WordPress. I have an account with the Hub and no other host runs WordPress as smoothly as these guys. So much faster that any other host that I use or have used. If your site doesn’t load fast, you’re visitors will get impatient and leave and go find some other distributor. The Hub uses the cPanel control panel (the best) and the Fantastico 1-click script installer. WordPress is right there in the list of scripts and is ready to install. Here is my WebHostingHub review if you’d like to read more. Click here to get a WebHostingHub account.
2. iPage – This is a very popular host that uses the vDeck control panel. It’s similar to cPanel. They use the SimpleScripts script installer for installing WordPress and a bunch of other scripts. They are an eco-friendly green host so that’s something that will fit in nicely with your herbal business. They also have an anytime moneyback guarantee. Here is my iPage review to read more. Click here to get an iPage account.

I hope that helps you.