Registering your Domain
Once you’ve set up a domain name through ReclaimHosting, — choose their $30 “Student/Individual/DOOO package and fill out your contact information — you’ll get a confirmation email with your login and password (don’t lose these!) to Reclaim Hosting’s “Client Area.” NB: If you can avoid it, don’t use your SFU email address, because the university’s spam filter will block your verification email.
If you follow that link (or otherwise go to reclaimhosting.com) and log in to the Client Area, you’ll find a link to a tool called “cPanel” which is where you set up your web hosting. From there, you can set up WordPress and any other tools you want.
Installing WordPress
Go to the cPanel interface. WordPress is the first icon you’ll see. Clicking on that will take you to an information page, which tells you about WordPress, and also gives you a button to “Install this application.” Click that to set up a new WordPress site on your domain.
You can leave almost all of the details with their default settings, but TAKE NOTE OF THE ADMINISTRATOR USERNAME and PASSWORD!. You’ll need these to log in. Better still, change the username and password to something more memorable than the computer-generated defaults. Note that this is a separate login and password than the one that gets you into Reclaim Hosting itself.
You should set the title of your new site, and the site tagline. You can leave the rest of the settings at the defaults. We don’t recommend setting up WordPress as a multi-site installation, as that adds extra complexity.
That’s it. Your new website is now set up, and you can click through to the administration interface. You’ll need to remember what the administrator id and password were!
A good thing to do first thing when you get into your WordPress site is to set up a second administrator account, so that if you lose access to the original one, you have a second one. Go to the “Users” link on the left side, and “Add new” — make sure you choose “Administrator” from the Role menu.
You’ll likely need a separate email address for that second WordPress account, because WordPress only allows a single login account per email address (for security reasons). If you don’t have a second email, you could go set one up on your new domain… it’s one of the many options available on the cPanel.
That’s it. Your new WordPress site should be up and visible to the world — sometimes it takes a few minutes for your new domain to become visible, but it’s usually pretty fast.
You can now start writing.
Step-by-Step Presentation
Use this step-by-step presentation to set up your WordPress site on Reclaim Hosting.