You want to have a blog of your own but don’t want to spend the time and energy to manage it? Then you must read on. Or do you already have a blog registered on blogger, wordpress, or any of those blogging services? Most likely, your blog address is a subdomain like yourname.wordpress.com or yourname.blogger.com. It does makes sense to blog at your own domain for it gives you your own exclusive identity and is a sure sign of style.

Intro

For a website we need to buy hosting and a domain name. In this case, we will use the built-in free (yet fantastic) hosting from wordpress.com. Next we need to buy a domain and then point it to wordpress.com nameservers, a little complicated for a first-time user. So we will avoid even that and instead buy a domain name from wordpress.com directly which takes care of all domain related settings making life real easy.

Now here are the Steps:

1. Sign up for an account at wordpress.com. It’s free.
2. Now open a blog by filling up the get a new wordpress.com form

Get A WordPress Blog

3. Now login to your new blog’s dashboard. Go to Settings>Domains

Add Domain To Your WordPress.com Blog

4. Type in a desired domain name. The domain name you type should end with a proper TLD like .com, .net, org, etc. The domain name should not be in already in use by someone else.
5. If the domain name is available, on the next page you will be presented with the option to buy it against 15 wordpress.com credits per year which you can buy via Paypal.

That’s all. Let wordpress.com take care of your domain and hosting - you need not worry about the technicalities of maintaining a website.

For users who already have a domain name, you need to add these nameservers in the control panel of your domain name provider:

• NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
• NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
• NS3.WORDPRESS.COM

Cost

To register a domain name with WordPress, you need to shell out $15/year and to map an existing domain already registered somewhere $10/year.

Bottomline

The domains feature is just great but buying the domain name from outside makes more sense as it turns out to be cheaper. WordPress doesn’t allow the nameservers for the domain registered through them neither do they provide mail hosting. Even MX editing feature is not yet available so you can’t host your email with an external mail provider like Google Apps either. So final verdict - let WordPress handle your hosting while you register your domain name with an external domain name provider.