It appears that everyone today wants to start a blog, and the way in which many people begin is by making use of a free blogging system such as 'Blogger' or other free blogging services like 'Hub Pages'. However, sooner or later you will want to have more control over your blog by having your own website name and blog, this will ensure that your blog never gets shut down. Among the best methods to do this is as simple as installing a WordPress blog on your domain name and this article will show you 5 simple steps to setting up WordPress on your personal site.

For those who have never carried this out before it can seem pretty complex but in actual fact it's very simple to perform. It is also confusing by the fact that there are two differing types of WordPress blogs. WordPress.com is a free blog service similar to Google's blogger, although WordPress.org is what we will be using to set up our blog on our own domain name. Thus giving us much more control than we get while using the free providers.

Step one: In order to host your own blog the first things you will need are a domain name and a hosting account. The domain name will be the web address of your new blog, and if this is going to be a personal blog then it is a good idea to try to use your own name in the domain. It is also a good idea to keep your domain name and your hosting account with separate companies. This just keeps you a little bit more control although it is no big deal if you have them both the same company.

Step two: By now you will have your domain name pointing to your hosting account and the first thing you need to do is go into Cpanel. This is the main dashboard for controlling your hosting account, now scroll down until you see and icon called Fantastico and click that.

Step three: This will show you all the different scripts that you can install from this location. From here find WordPress and click on it.

Step four: This will take you to an easy to use install page have a quick look at it and if all seems correct click the set up now button. You will then get asked which directory you will want to install your blog in, for most of us we will install the blog within the root directory, which means that we do not have to enter anything here. On the other hand if you want to install that blog in any other directory then just key in the name of the directory here and your blog will be set up.

Step five: So that is it, your blog is installed on your personal hosting account and all you've got to do right now is log in and choose which theme you need to utilize for your blog, and what plugins you should install, but this is the topic of a later article.