The Alternative to Medium/Substack Has Been Here for Awhile

…For literally everyone else that isn’t a tech masochist… In 2003, Mike Kittle 1 and Matt Mullenweg 2 created a fork of b2/cafelog and started the work on a free and open-sourced program that over 43% of the internet uses today to host their own websites: you may know it as WordPress. Twenty years later, the duo are working on completely different projects 3 , but WordPress remains completely free and open-sourced for all to use. the purpose of this article is to show you, dear reader (or podcast listener) how I setup my website, while also giving you the knowledge and tools to do the same. IMPORTANT TO NOTE !!! While WordPress is a completely free program and does not require any money to use or install, hosting the program online does cost A VARIABLE AMOUNT OF MONEY unless you are self-hosting from your own NAS OR HOME SERVER (AND, HONESTLY, IF YOU’RE SELF-HOSTING YOUR OWN WORDPRESS SITE, YOU PROBABLY DON’T NEED MY HELP ANYWAY). A. Purchasing Your Own Domain from a Domain Registrar In the last blog entry, i spoke about purchasing my own domain from [redacted registrar name here], but outside of that location: i usually recommend my personal friends and family purchase and manage their domains through porkbun because they just offer a better non-technical experience than other domain registrars like Squarespace 4 or network solutions . I recorded the process of purchasing and registering a random domain for 1 year through PorkBun. Most custom domains are about as cheap as the one I bought! the only alternative registrars i REALLY love is almost exclusively cloudflare, which really isn’t as user-friendly as porkbun, but icann also keeps a listing of accredited registrars if you’d like to research your own options. B. Self-Hosting Your WordPress site In the interest of being totally transparent, I will reiterate that the only way self-hosting WordPress is free is if you are personally self-hosting from your own NAS or home server, which is not what I will be outlining how to do or how to setup. If you’re interested in doing so (for free) and happen to want to look down the self-hosting rabbit hole, I highly recommend setting up your own Ubuntu server, following this linked guide, and starting the networking hell that is comprised of NAT rules and port forwarding 5 . Have fun. For literally everyone else that isn’t a tech masochist, we’re going to use a WordPress hosting site called hostinger to accomplish the same thing for insanely cheap; when I say “insanely cheap” i mean this is going to cost you around $50/year 6 . As a final final aside before we start the hosting site walk-through: there are a lot of WordPress hosting sites ( and I recommend really any of them except for DreamHost and WordPress.com 7 ), but you can always move your WordPress site using free backups and restores if the hosting provider you choose doesn’t work out! I recorded the process of purchasing WordPress hosting through Hostinger for a random domain. In order to purchase the Single Web Hosting deal, you’ll need to CREATE AN ACCOUNT or LOGIN to Hostinger. I know, it sucks. Hostinger is ideal mostly for the ease-of-access that it allows while setting up a wordpress website. to get the best deal on your hosting, you’ll need to select the single web hosting deal which is only available after either creating an account or logging in. The video above shows the process i used after logging in to access the single web hosting plan, but (for podcast listeners) the process is: Select WEBSITES from the menu on the left hand side of the page. Select SINGLE WEB HOSTING for US$ 1.99/mo Select the duration for the plan. 8 Pay for the plan using your choice of payment provider. after hostinger has processed your payment, you’re immediately whisked into the next stage: setting up your actual website. there is a very nifty little series of prompts that’ll come up and, in order to make sure you have free reign of your website, you’ll want to follow these next instructions very closely. once again, i’ve included a video guide below showcasing my experience filling out the steps, but i encourage everyone (especially any podcast listeners) to follow along. Setting up my WordPress site a random domain through Hostinger is terrifyingly simple with these prompts. Select SKIP in purple text at the bottom-right corner which is directly left to the NEXT button. Select CREATE A WEBSITE and press NEXT. Select WORDPRESS (Fully Customizable) and press NEXT. Enter an email address and password that you’d like to use to login to the admin portal for your website. Press NEXT. Select CREATE A BLANK SITE in purple text at the bottom-right corner, which is directly left to the NEXT button. Enter the domain name that you purchase from Porkbun Select DO YOU OWN THIS DOMAIN? USE IT and then press NEXT. Choose a server location for your website and then press NEXT. 9 (Optional) Mouse-over PLUGINS on the left menu and select INSTALLED PLUGINS. (Optional) Deactivate the following plugins: Hostinger Easy Onboarding, Hostinger Reach, Hostinger Tools, LiteSpeed Cache. When deactivating LiteSpeed Cache, you do not need to provide a reason for deactivating and can just select the DEACTIVATE button on the bottom left. (Optional) Delete the following plugins: Hostinger Easy Onboarding, Hostinger Reach, Hostinger Tools, LiteSpeed Cache. Select SETTINGS on the left menu. Enter a SITE TITLE and TAGLINE for your website. (Optional) Upload a SITE ICON. Change ADMINISTRATION EMAIL ADDRESS to an email address that you own. Guess what. Your website is literally almost done; just one more simple thing we need to do… 10 C. Pointing Your Domain’s DNS to Your Website You’re probably exhausted from all the steps so far, and i promise this one is the absolute last one to make your new WordPress website live on the internet. unfortunately, it also happens to be the most dangerous step so far. If you bought your domain in step one and didn’t have an existing domain, this step isn’t that bad, but if you happened to be using an old domain and currently have it setup for something like email or another website, this step could break that if done incorrectly. (you can always contact me for personalized support, btw.) when in doubt, just stop and don’t move forward. DNS is a very scary concept for non-tech users, but I hope this video helps make the process easier! LOGIN to Hostinger. Select MANAGE under the SINGLE WEB HOSTING section for your domain. Select DOMAIN (Action Required). Above the YouTube video, select A RECORD in purple text. Open Porkbun in another tab and navigate to the DOMAIN MANAGEMENT page. Select the drop-down for DETAILS under your domain. Select DNS RECORDS. (IMPORTANT) SCROLL DOWN AND SCREENSHOT ALL THE TYPES, HOST, ANSWER, TTL, AND PRIORITY ITEMS UNDER CURRENT RECORDS. (IMPORTANT) SAVE THAT SCREENSHOT SOMEWHERE SAFE IN CASE ANYTHING GOES WRONG! (Optional) Delete the ALIAS record with the answer uixie.porkbun.com (Optional) Delete the CNAME record with the answer uixie.porkbun.com Scroll up to the top of the window and make sure the TYPE of A – Address record is selected. Copy the information from Hostinger into the proper Porkbun prompts. (Hostinger) NAME = (Porkbun) HOST (Hostinger) POINT TO = (Porkbun) ANSWER / VALUE (Hostinger) TTL = (Porkbun) TTL Under the NOTES prompt on Porkbun, input Hostinger DNS Press ADD. Repeat Steps 12-15 for the second A Record Entry on Hostinger. Go back to Hostinger and check the box next to I’VE CHANGED THE A RECORDS. The propagation of dns can take anywhere from 24-72 hours to finish, but porkbun is pretty fast about propagating, so it may be done in a few minutes. you should be able to go to www.yourdomainnamehere.com and see it online now! i promise, the scariest stuff is now officially behind us. congratulations! by the way, you can now login to the admin portal of your website by typing in www.yourdomainnamehere.com/wp-admin and logging in using the administration email address that you setup earlier. D. Customizing WordPress Into a Newsletter because WordPress as a tool has been around for a few decades now, there are tons of free themes and plugins that you can use on your site to make your own newsletter. the first plugin i always recommend for this purpose, and my personal favorite, is the newsletter plugin. you can use this with really any theme you like to make subscription easy and the free version of this plugin works super well out of the box. one of the only issues i’ve run into with sending emails via WordPress is having those subscription emails getting stuck in the spam filter. the fix for that is a combination of other free tools: fluentsmtp a free wordpress plugin that allows you to adjust your email settings for WordPress SMTP2GO an email sender that integrates directly with FluentSMTP allows you to send 1,000 emails FOR FREE a month (which will be fine for most creators) or larger amounts like 10,000 emails a month for $15/month (for super large scale creators) there ARE variable monetary amounts, of course if you are one of those people who likes getting money from subscriptions for your newsletters, you can also look into setting up direct paypal or stripe donations using the free accept donations with paypal & stripe plugin. while companies like medium or substack take a certain percentage of your subscriptions to pay for their services, this plugin allows you to work directly with paypal/stripe themselves and doesn’t take a cut of your money meaning: you get to keep all the money you make !! 11 i know this post is about newsletters, but i talked about autoblue last blog entry and will remind readers/listeners that i still think this tool is amazing for non-email integration. if you’re looking from wordpress to discord, or from wordpress to another platform integration: the integration probably already exists, you just need to search for it! You’re All Done !! (Hopefully) everything i outlined in this article is exactly how i plan to build out my own newsletter, so if you run into issues with this setup: I’ve probably already run into them and solved them, which is why I’m happy to help people with this process especially if they contact me directly !! 12 i truly believe that scalable options like wordpress are one of the only ways creators like me will be able to thrive on the internet and praxis demands that i share information like this for others too.