Many people asked me questions of:
- how to start blogging,
- where I bought the .com address,
- how much I paid for it,
- where I hosted my blog,
- and all blogging related questions.

It’s not that I don’t want to answer them, but following the programmer’s main philosophy, “Don’t Repeat Yourself – DRY”, I decided to answer all of the questions here.

Be reminded that this is may not be a best blogging practice nor the only way to blog. I just want to share on how I blog and the tools I use.

Let’s rolll….

1. Blog Software

Blogging software maybe the most important tool a blogger need. Without this, I think there will be no blog. The blog software I chose is, you guess it, wordpress.

It’s a beautiful software that is being developed by open source community at a very fast speed, making it better and better on its releases.

It also has a lot of free plugins and templates, two other most important things that I really consider when choosing the software.

2. Domain name (.com, .org, etc)

So you want to get serious in blogging and want your name.com as the blog address. Having a domain name really makes your blog looks professional and sets you apart from other blogger who use their name.blogger.com or their name.wordpress.com.

Fortunately, buying a domain name is also as simple as it can be nowadays. First check the availability of the domain name you want. If it is still avaialable, go buy it immediately before someone else do.

You can buy domain name from pasarweb.com, kotahosting.com, or andalan.net for around Rp100,000 for one year. Don’t forget to extend the domain after it expires.

3. Hosting

Ofcourse when you decide to have your own domain name.com you need to have a hosting server to put your blog. Actually this part is quite the techie part compared to the two previous things to do.

Yet don’t worry, life has been very kind to us till now, and hosting your own blog is not expensive nowadays. In fact, djitz.com is hosted in a free hosting server, courtesy of 000webhost.com.

So far I recommended 000webhost.com to everyone who ask me about what is the best hosting server. It has cPanel just as all other paid hosting server has, and it has WordPress as part of its fantastico wizard install. Trust me, this saves you great deal of time installing wordpress if you are a newbie.

Keep in mind to regularly backup your blog website and database however. Because 000webhost.com is a free hosting server, I don’t think you can complain much whenever their server gets into trouble, something that actually happened only once so far during my one year hosting term there.

It All Ends Here..

So yeah, those are the three most frequently asked questions about starting to blog like me. If you are totally new to blogging, I recommend you to at least try blogging in wordpress.com before setting up blog with your own name.com. At least get familiar with the software WordPress, that I believe is the gold standard software for blogging.

Happy blogging fellas!