WordPress Now Powers 50 Million Blogs: How to Start Your Own

WordPress.com announced that there are now more than 50 million blogs powered by WordPress's open source software. About half of those blogs are hosted at WordPress.com while the others reside on blog owners own servers or server space rented from hosting providers.

WordPress.com hosts sites for free, though there are features you can buy including paying $30 a year to eliminate ads on your site or fees that larger blogs can pay to increase the amount of available storage.

Two Ways to Use WordPress

There are two ways to use WordPress. You can set up a free blog at WordPress.com or you can either install the  free open source WordPress software on any Internet hosting service's servers or use the  software that many service providers have preinstalled on their servers.  For example, my LarrysWorld.com blog is hosted by Bluehost.com which charges me $5.95 a month to host an unlimited number of domains (I use the same account to host SafeKids.com, SafeTeens.com and NoBellyPrize.com). There are plenty of other companies that host WordPress sites as you can see from this Google search.

Getting started with WordPress is actually pretty easy. After you establish an account with WordPress.com or one of the other hosting services, you need to select a theme (or stick with the default theme) and then just go to the WordPress dashboard to type in your first blog post.  Themes, by the way, determine the way your blog is going to look, and what's great about themes is that if you don't like the look, you can easily change themes without affecting the content of your blog.

WordPress is used by an incredibly wide variety of individuals and organizations including some very impressive ones like my friend Harry McCracken's Technologizer site and All Things Digital which is part of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network.  Even CBS Radio uses WordPress for some of its websites and blogs.

 

 

 

Follow Larry Magid on Twitter: www.twitter.com/larrymagid

Comments

[WpThemesAndTips]

08:59 PM on 08/25/2011

When WordPress started it was a blogging platform. Now it has evolved into a more complete CMS. More and more website owners are using WordPress for purposes other than simply blogging, and premium themes are being used in many of these cases.

With the affordability of great premium themes, WordPress seems like it will continue to grow even more popular among these types of sites. I believe that this growth will increase the need for more complex plugins.

Source: wpth.net

[drumz]

01:04 PM on 07/13/2011

So those hosting companies set up the database Wordpress runs off too? I'm wondering because that is one of the first steps in setting up Wordpress on a server. Or do they charge @ $60 which would make up for the low hosting fee?

[craftycrow]

03:42 PM on 07/13/2011

I set my site up through Bluehost, and then Wordpress was free and running when I started. You create your wordpress login and do everything through that, for the most part. You don't ever really have to login to the Bluehost site, unless you want to tweak your database. You just run everything via Wordpress. So for $60, I got my domain and wordpress.

[drumz]

04:15 PM on 07/13/2011

You need a dB to run WP.

I have setup WP on a number of different servers and the first thing you have to do is create the dB and point the WP install to it.

[craftycrow]

04:18 PM on 07/13/2011

I can't reply to your comment yet, but I can see it. Bluehost sets up the db for you, and it takes you through the steps to get Wordpress set up (which takes about 90 seconds).