Here’s a testimonial from a client who recently switched to WordPress. Be sure and check out Jenny’s blogs and see what she’s up to!
I had my two websites with another company for two years. I paid over $600 a year for both websites. I was not only looking for a way to reduce my yearly cost of the website, but also a way to get them in a blog format. I wanted them in a blog format because I wanted to have a two-way communication with my readers and also wanted the possibility of being able to write a lot one day and have the posts publish for the next week. In other words, I didn’t want to have to write everyday, but my readers still get to read articles everyday! So, I looked into blogging and Ninja Blog Setup and another service were recommended to me.
So I decided that I would look into both companies and after several e-mails with Shawn, I ended up going with Ninja Blog Setup. Shawn is so easy to communicate with. He emails you back very quickly, answers all my questions and if he doesn’t have the answer, he investigates it until he does!
So, although I just wanted to have two websites transferred to Wordpress, I ended up starting two more websites. Unlike the previous company I was with, when you sign up for hosting with Hostgator, you can have as many websites as you want. So I just keep thinking of ideas and ask Shawn to set them up for me.
Now I am in the process of having Shawn upgrade my sites to Premium Wordpress Installations! Thanks, Shawn. I really am excited about the possibilities ahead.
Jenny Dean of http://www.floppycats.com/, http://www.antioxidant-fruits.com/, http://www.businessblogwriters.com/ and http://www.yoga2010.com/.
Hello everyone! As we wind down the last day of 2009 and get ready for a new year, I just wanted to announce the relaunch of Ninja Blog Setup. What started as a service to offer people free WordPress blog installations has now grown to something much bigger. Ninja Blog Setup now offers blog transfers to new servers, blog transfers to new domains, Blogger to WordPress transfers, and our very own Ninja Lifeline blogger help desk. Check out our new services as well as our new website design.
Let me know what you think and have a Happy New Year!
Blog-well.com has put together a great guide on how to transfer your site from WordPress.com (your url would look like this: yourwebsite.wordpress.com) to your own domain (yourwebsite.com) and fully hosted using your own hosting account.
Previously you ran the risk of losing your page rank and any search engine rankings and incoming link traffic, but the free report tells you how to take care of all that and move without cost in traffic or rankings:
Transfer Blog From WordPress.com to Your Own Domain
As an alternative, you can let a Ninja install your blog for free 
Regarding “WordPress Hosting” Claims of Installations
A lot of WordPress companies advertise that they offer “free” or “included” WordPress installation with their hosting, but what they offer is actually a way for you to do your own blog installation.
Sure what they provide is easier than doing a completely manual installation of WordPress, but if you just use their tools, you’ll still be a long ways from having a fully functional blog. Also, unless you happen to be a very technical person you will have spent quite a bit of your time doing all the rest of the work.
That’s why I decided to create the Ninja Blog Setup service. With our service, which can be completely free, all you do is sign up for WordPress hosting (and a domain name if you need one) from one of our associate links, send us the signup information and around 24 hours later you’ll have a fully configured WordPress blog ready for you to begin writing.
No work, no stress, join the professional blogging community immediately.
You can see the complete list of our services (themes, plugins & configurations) included with each WordPress installation.
Special Offer: Sign-up for WordPress hosting using one of our preferred hosts and Ninja Blog Setup will install, setup and configure a WordPress blog for you, for free! (After you sign-up for hosting, fill out the form to order your blog installation.)
Choose Your Host Wisely
Before you can have a self-hosted WordPress blog with your very own domain name, you must first select a host for your site. The host is the company that provides the server where your site will be digitally stored on a hard drive and be continually connected to the internet where it can be accessed by billions of internet users. All hosts are not created equally, however, so it pays to learn just a little bit about what you should look for in a quality blog hosting company.
WordPress Hosting Plan Components
A standard hosting environment for blog hosting software will include the following components.
- Apache web server, which is found on almost 100% of Linux hosting services.
- SQL server – usually MySQL which will manage the WordPress blog database.
- A mail host, which allows your WordPress site to send email notifications for things like comments, password resets and administrator functions.
- Fantastico - allows easy installation of WordPress and many other popular website management tools: Drupal (themes), osCommerce, Moveable Type.
- PHP – WordPress runs best on the latest version of php 5+
WordPress Hosting Benefits
Getting your WordPress site hosting setup on your own domain name can have many benefits over using free blog hosting services like WordPress.com or Blogger.
- Custom WordPress themes: You can visit any of the many WordPress themes download sites and modify it or have a designer modify it to perfectly represent your topic or business blog.
- WordPress plug-ins: You can perform an almost unlimited number of creative services that make creating a blog easier.
- Multiple sites: With a web hosting reseller unlimited account, or even many shared hosting plans, you can host 20 or more WordPress blogs on one hosting provider plan.
WordPress Host Advanced Features
There are many blog hosting elements that will not affect the novice or low traffic blogger searching for reliable and affordable WordPress hosting. However once your WordPress blog begins to earn decent money or you experience bandwidth limits or process throttling, you may want to upgrade to a more advanced WordPress host.
- Server virtualization allows your WordPress blog to run unaffected by other sites on the same server. You are protected from downtime that could result from other sites’ traffic spikes or errors.
- Dual processor servers or even quad processor servers provide extra speed and power for high traffic or processor intensive sites. For example lots of AJAX or many database calls for each page that is served. WordPress hosting will sometimes benefit from this if your site has a lot of traffic.
WordPress Web Host Cautions
These are the primary things to be aware of when looking for WordPress blog hosting:
- Windows hosting – WordPress will run on Windows servers, but it can be a hassle and some features like the very important search engine friendly links (permalinks) can be almost impossible. Avoid Windows Servers for WordPress hosting (this has nothing to do with the Windows on your own PC.
- Poor support – Before I signup for any WordPress hosting, I always like to contact support with a question. Just ask “what version of WordPress is your Fantastico currently installing?” if you can’t think of anything else to ask.
- If it isn’t the latest version, the blog host may not be the most reliable hosting company.
- If it takes a long time for them to respond to your question (more than a couple hours), move along and select another.
- Cheap hosting – look for blog hosting experts. Sure going with a $2 a month plan will be probably be fine when things are running smoothly, but when your best post ever gets mentioned on ProBlogger.net or Digg.com and your server crashes, you won’t want to wait 24 hours for a response to your service ticket.
- Shady promises of free WordPress installations. I see quite a few blog hosting companies advertising “free WordPress installation” but they really only have a way for you to just install the basics yourself. You’ll still be many hours of work away from having the type of blog you are expecting.
Fortunately our WordPress hosting offer allows you to get a fully featured WordPress blog setup and ready to blog for free, just by signing up for your WordPress hosting services from any of the hosting links on this page.
Happy blogging,
Ninja Shawn
