Web Site Hosting

Ok, so I have been trying to figure all this out for the past week.  There are two different ways to do WordPress.  The easy way is just going to wordpress.com and signing up for a blog.  The hard(er) way is to go to wordpress.org and download the files to have your own self hosted blog.  I have done the easy way since I started blogging on WordPress.  I want to try the hard way.  

Well, after many fatal attempts to make it work, I have finally succeeded in figuring it all out.  Great!  Now what?  Well, now I have found out that you not only have to own the domain (mine is brookjames.com) but you also have to be able to host there too.  I used GoDaddy.com to purchase my domain.  Fortunately they have free hosting!  Woo!  

Unfortunately that excitement was short lived.  As soon as I got all the self hosting WordPress stuff figured out I found out that GoDaddy is a punk and the free hosting they give you is free…but they tag on an awful looking header onto the page with their ad.  Awesome.  So now I can have a sweet looking blog with whatever template or layout that I want (which you can’t do when you blog the easy way with WordPress), but the page looks stupid because of the crappy header from GoDaddy!  Could they not have been nice to us and let it be a footer?  Grrr.

I always thought I was pretty good with computers (but not quite a computer nerd), but this has been a complete learning experience from the start!  I didn’t have a clue!  I just hope I can figure it out if I ever try to do it again!  So does anyone out there know of a good web hosting place?  I would prefer a really cheap one.  GoDaddy wants to charge me about $5 a month to get rid of their ads.  Is it even possible to use a different hosting place with a domain purchased from GoDaddy?

No this picture has nothing to do with web hosting.  I have no idea what a good web hosting picture would look like.  So here.  This will do.  Now look at the picture again and say awwwww!