For me, Saturday February 28, 2009 was a Big Bang of sorts. I’d spent the better part of the previous two weeks somewhere between the depths of despair and slight glimmers of hope. Mostly the former. My company was at the (long) tail-end of an office move, and the last to go was our collection of servers (email, web, blogs). To put it mildly, the move didn’t go smoothly, and just in case I needed a reminder that hosting isn’t our core competency (which I didn’t), I got one.

I’d resolved many times before to start moving our applications to a real hosted platform, but somehow just never quite got around to it. This time, though, I really had to figure it out if my content was going to see the light of day again (and for many days in a row with no downtime even!). So here’s my story.

I’d read enough about WordPress to know it was the leading blogging platform, and that it was evolving into a content management system with user and roles, a robust market for third-party apps (plug-ins in the vernacular), and other features I needed.

I knew there were lots of hosting options, and read some reviews of some of them that hosted WordPress. One of them in particular — www.dreamhost.com — sounded interesting, so I went with it

 I was very pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get up and running in transitioning to the new environment. here’s what I did:

1.       Registered and paid for a year’s worth of hosting on dreamhost.com — $119.95 for one year (they discount down to $5.95 per month, but only if you pay for 10 years!)

2.       Signed in to networksolutions.com, which is where we maintain our domain names. 

3.       Changed the dns settings for dynamicscrmtrickbag.com and dynamicscrmtrickbag.net to point to the dreamhost name servers.

4.       Signed in to dreamhost to get to their “control panel”. Had to create an admin account in the process.

5.       From the control panel, clicked on Goodies, then did the “one-click install”. (they have this one-click install for many of the most popular hosted apps, including wordpress 2.71 – the first one in the list – and joomla, a wiki, and lots of others.)

6.       Did the one-click install for WordPress, using the “advanced” option. Had to specify another admin account – this one for the mysql database – and could NOT use the same one as for the dreamhost control panel.

7.       I had to create one final admin account – this one for my now up and running hosted blog site at www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com

I waited 20 minutes and everything was done. Boom. Now I have to write some content people might want to read. That’s the hard part — and it’s what SHOULD be the hard part. Not all this hosting stuff.