Aight, let’s jot this down before I completely forget how I did this again. I spent years dreaming of creating a blog and procrastinated on it because it seemed like too much work on the surface. Well guess what? It took me less than a day to set this all up, starting from my 3 AM research on blogging this morning to writing this post tonight, with ample breaks in between. I’m going to go through the process step-by-step.
1. Registering a domain name
After reigniting my interest in blogging again in the middle of a restless night, I impulsively bought the domain name “the-renaissance.org” from Porkbun. I also considered buying from Namecheap, which I have also used for other domain names, but Porkbun was the winner when it came to pricing in this case.
2. Choosing a web host
I previously used the free plan of Netlify to host my portfolio site, but this time around, I decided to pay for a service for the simple reason of convenience. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time researching how to do this or that and then getting bored before I even started. Paying for a web hosting service made setting everything up easy.
I did do a bit of research to decide on which hosting service to use. I was considering Bluehost and SiteGround at first as they seemed to be two of the top contenders. In the end, I ultimately settled on DreamHost due to its pricing for its Shared (Starter) plan at $6.99/month after the first year (which was priced at $2.95/month at the time of writing). I figured I didn’t need to pay more for, quite frankly, a blog I don’t expect to see a lot of traffic to.
I installed WordPress via DreamHost’s Web Panel and checked my website. Oops! It led to an unresponsive page because I wasn’t quite done setting up yet.
3. Configuring nameservers
Since I was using a domain name registered with Porkbun, I needed to configure my domain’s nameservers on Porkbun to use DreamHost’s nameservers. The DreamHost nameservers were sent to me via email, but I was also able to find it through DreamHost’s nameservers guide here.
- ns1.dreamhost.com
- ns2.dreamhost.com
- ns3.dreamhost.com
I then followed Porkbun’s nameservers guide to figure out where to copy and paste these URLs to. In short, go to Account > Domain Management, click on the details dropdown for your domain and edit “Authoritative Nameservers” to use the DreamHost nameservers instead of the Porkbun ones. Easy.
4. Setting up SSL certificates
First off, I’m not really sure if this step was necessary. I made the mistake of forgetting to set up my nameservers promptly and received an email from DreamHost stating that my Let’s Encrypt order was cancelled because DNS and/or web hosting is necessary to prove domain ownership. I actually completed this step before the previous step, but I eventually got it working anyway.
Porkbun generates free SSL certificates using Let’s Encrypt as well, which renews automatically as long as I’m using Porkbun as my DNS provider. SSL certificates are used to ensure that the connection between the web server and browser is secure. It’s also the thing that gives you the little lock icon next to the site URL in the browser.
It took a bit of time for Porkbun to generate the certificate for my website. I knew my certificate was ready when the text changed to “Have Certificate” under the SSL section of the details dropdown of my Porkbun domain. I downloaded and unzipped the SSL bundle.
Next, I needed to import the SSL certificate from Porkbun to DreamHost. In DreamHost’s Web Panel, I went to Websites > Manage Websites, pressed on the triple dots under my site, and selected “SSL Security”. I then chose the import option.
The unzipped SSL bundle from Porkbun contained four files of the extension “pem”. I only used domain.cert, intermediate.cert, and private.key. I opened each of these in a text editor. I copied the first certificate block of domain.cert.pem to the “Certificate” input box in DreamHost’s Certificate Configuration section. (Note that there were 3 different certificate blocks in the file and only the first block worked for me.) Next I copied the entire contents of private.key.pem into the “RSA Private Key” section. Finally I copied the entire contents of intermediate.cert.pem into the “Intermediate Certificate” section. Confirmed the changes and it was successful!
5. Congrats, you have a running blog!
At last, my blog was up and running! I followed the link in an email I received from DreamHost to log into my blog’s WordPress account. Optionally, I created another user to use a nicer username than my autogenerated username, made it an admin, and deleted the old user. Totally unnecessary step, but the autogenerated username sucked.
Anyway, there you have it! I like to think future-me will thank past-me for this write-up. And hopefully you, reader, may benefit from this post too!