“The first step is to buy a hosting plan. Currently we offer 3 different hosting plans to accomadate the wide variety of websites we host. Generally we recomend starting with our base service, and then upgrading your hosting package when your website becomes more popular. Don’t know which hosting plan to buy? Here’s an easy guide to help. After selecting a plan, you can choose to pay either monthly or yearly. Generally we recomend paying yearly since it’s a pain to remember to pay every month and then you also get two months free! After purchasing your service, you should recieve a couple emails from us: A confirmation of the hosting package you’ve selected. A reciept confirming that your Paypal puchase went through. An email detailing your 123Host.Me Account login information. (You can change your password later). Now we have to buy a domain so your visitors can easily access your site. BUYING A DOMAIN Great! Now that you have a place to host your website, you need to buy a domain name to help your visitors find your content. Since we are solely focusing on providing the best WordPress hosting possible, we currently don’t offer domain purchasing services. However, we recomend: Google Domains: https://domains.google Namecheap: namecheap.com SETTING UP YOUR DNS Now that you have your domain name, we have to connect the two web services together. When you bought one of our hosting packages, we automatically sent you an email with the subject “”New Account Information that contains your host name and server IP. It will look like this: hostX.123host.me IP: 123.456.789.987 First, you will want to the copy and paste the IP numbers into your “”A”” record. Sometimes its looks like @. The “”A”” record is the most important setting within your DNS. Then, you will need to create a new CNAME called “”www””, and put the same IP address. On most domain providers, you can also just put the @ sign (which tells it that it’s the same IP as the “”A”” record). Now with the DNS setup, when your users type in your domain name, they will be instantly sent to your WordPress site on our hosting servers. Have to set up the CNAME so that if your users type www.domainname.com before your domain name, it will still go to your site. LOGGING INTO ACCOUNT MANAGER With all that setup, now we can get to the fun stuff! First we have to log into our account at: https://my.123host.me After logging in, you will see the home page of our 123Host.Me Account Manager. From this page you can easily manage all aspects of your web hosting package including creating tickets, asking questions, upgrading services, and renewing services. 123Host Me Control Panel In the “”Your Active Services”” box, you will see the various hosting plans your have with us. Click on the domain you’d like to set up. On this Product Page, you can learn more about your hosting plan for this individual domain. On the bottom of the page is the same information we used before to set up the DNS. On the very bottom we have the “”Login into Plesk Control Panel”” button. Click the button to be taken to our Plesk Control Manager. Clicking the button should automatically log you in. If not, just use the information above the button to log into Plesk. Plesk Control Manager is the software we use to control and monitor the status of our web servers. Within Plesk you can check out the stats about your site, set up an FTP login, and much more. However, since this is our first time logging in, we want to set up our website. 123HostMe Plesk Homepage INSTALLING WORDPRESS For more of our users, they want a website that’s easy to setup and maintain. So instead of coding a website from scratch, most users use a CMS (content management system) called “”Wordpress””. If you’re looking to setup a WordPress site, click on the “”One-Click WordPress”” Button on the Plesk homepage. You will then follow the setup wizard to setup your WordPress site. Remember to write down or print out your initial database username and passwords for safe keeping. With WordPress set up, you’re all set to start adding your great content! Learn How to Design your WordPress Site 123HOST.ME DESIGN SERVICES If you want to spice up your website, we do offer WordPress design services. Just email us at [email protected] to get started!”

“Great, I have my WordPress site set up! Now what? Now it’s time to start designing your website and adding content. DESIGNING YOUR SITE After installing WordPress, WordPress automatically comes with a few free themes to start with. Although they’re pretty good, normally web designers will want to change them so that they match the style of your brand better. Generally you can do this within the “”Appearance Tab”” on the left menu. If you don’t like the free theme, you can always buy professional themes online on websites such as https://WordPress.org/themes/, https://themeforest.net/category/WordPress, or https://www.templatemonster.com/WordPress-themes.php. A good theme generally costs between $50-$75. ADDING CONTENT Now that your website has the right style, let’s add some content. First you probably want to make a few pages that are normally on every webpage: About Page Contact Page Products Page Your don’t have to create a Home Page since that was created by default. Now start adding all the info about your brand! If you need pictures, you can find some free pictures at https://search.creativecommons.org/ 123HOST.ME DESIGN SERVICES If this seems like too much work, we would be happy to help you with our Design Services. Just email us at [email protected] to get started!”

“Now that you have a domain, let’s set up WordPress! First off, let’s explain why you need WordPress to begin with. Before WordPress or any content management systems (CMS) came out, it was pretty dififcult for non-technical people to make websites. You would have to hire a Web Designer to code and continually update your information. Now with WordPress, you can change and update your website yourself. With our optimized Client Area, it’s a breeze to setup WordPress. First, log into our Client Area at: https://my.123host.me/ Then on our Client Area, click the Services button. Then click the green “”Active”” button on the domain hosting service you’d like to install WordPress on. Once on the Domain Service Page, scroll down to the bottom and click on the Plesk Control Panel button. After clicking the button, you should be automatically logged into our Plesk Control Panel. Click on the “”Install WordPress”” button and following the instructions. During the WordPress installation, it’s going to ask you to input a few different settings and passwords. Make sure you write them down and save them for safe-keeping in case you need to modify your WordPress setup at a later date. After installing WordPress, head onto our next tutorial describing how to add content to your site: Building a WordPress Site”

“So you bought a web hosting package and now need a domain name? Well, you’ve come to the right place! There are hundreds of companies that offer online domain name services. Unfortunently, because of tough competition, most of these companies use deceiving marketing tactics to try to get your business. After using multiple domain name companies over the years, we here at 123HostMe have had our fair share of bad experiences. After much consideration, we believe the best domain provider is Google Domains: https://domains.google/ Sure, they may not be the cheapest option or provide the most variety of domain names. But when it comes to buying your domain name or setting your website, we believe having a simple hassle-free experience is key. And that’s what we’ve found when using Google. So after purchasing your domain name, follow our next tutorial on how to install WordPress: Setting up WordPress”

“Deciding on a hosting plan is the first step into hosting a website. It is often a tough decision because there are a lot of aspects to consider: How big is my website? How much traffic will I have? How much bandwidth do I need? Will my website out grow my choice? What do these things even mean? We’ve structured our pricing and plans around encouraging your growth as an organization. Most of these questions you don’t even have to worry about because you can always, at any time, upgrade your plan. At 123Host.me you only have to consider a few things when choosing a plan, and we’ll help you through it. STORAGE The first thing is how much stuff are you hosting on your website. Websites are usually quite a bit smaller than people think. You’re constantly trying to optomize your site for fast response, so the photos and media you’ll be hosting are most likely a lot smaller than you think. Our “”I’m Getting Started”” plan has 5 gigabytes of storage, that’s plenty for a personal portfolio or blog. A small company or organization that’s just getting started would also be a perfect fit for this plan. “”I’m On My Way”” is built for those that hit the ground running. With 10 gigabytes of storage, you can fit twice as much website into this plan. “”I’m On My Way”” would be great for a photographer’s portfolio who has a lot of photos to showcase, or an artist who wants to display their work. The “”I’m Established”” plan has 25 gigabytes of storage. This plan has been geared more towards organizations that have been around for a while who have a lot of photos and pages to share. Then you’ll want to think about how many visitors you’ll get each month. WEBSITE TRAFFIC Each of our plans has been optimized to handle a certain number of monthly visitors. You’ll want to make sure you choose a plan that matches the amount of traffic your webiste is expected to get. This one is pretty tough to estimate, but geneally if you can follow the names of our plans. If you’re just getting started, our “”I’m Getting Started”” plan would be a good fit. If your organizations has been around for a while or you’ve got a lot to share, the “”I’m Established”” plan would be a good fit. If you’re unsure about how much traffic your website will have feel free to reach out to our support team and we will help you choose the best one. If you start going over any limits on your website we’ll let you know that we’re proud of you, but it’s probably time to upgrade your plan. One of the biggest questions is, can my website handle peak traffic? We want to encourage our customer’s websites to grow and expand in popularity. Our limits aren’t hard, and we won’t take your website down if it get’s too much action. We’ll work with you to get your website upgraded to the plan it needs to succeed.”