In this post I’ll show you how to get free WordPress hosting from Namecheaps wordpress hosting company, Easywp.
Creating the site
The first step is to create an account with Namecheap, if you don’t have one already.
Once you’ve done that, visit the Easywp website.
On the homepage, click the button that says “Try for free”
Then login with Namecheap.
You will be taken to this page to create your website:
enter a name, then click continue.
Next you need to pick a plan. You can choose the best one as it’s free.
You might have noticed that it says “first month free”, and therefore you might be thinking that it’s not really free, and you’ll have to pay after the first month. However that’s not the case, and I’ll explain more further on in this tutorial.
Next, you need to chose your domain, you can use your own domain, or use a free one provided by EasyWP.
If you don’t have a domain, but are planning on getting one, you can use a free one for now, and then add your own later.
On the next page you can pick a theme, or choose skip.
The options are quite limited, and if you choose skip, you can pick a theme from a wider range later on, from within your WordPress site.
On the next page you can select some plugins.
Like the themes page, there aren’t many to choose from, but instead there are a short selection of plugins that can provide some useful functionality for your website, depending on what type of site you are aiming to create. You will be able to add more plugins later on, from your site.
Next, you will get to this page:
Click “continue to purchase”
You will then be asked to provide payment information, but don’t worry you won’t be charged yet, usually you’d be charged after one month but I’ll show you how to prevent that in the next steps.
Preventing getting charged
Once your site is created, go to your Namecheap account panel.
Then click on “Apps” from the menu
You should see a page like this:
Click the “subscriptions” tab
Once you are on the subscriptions page, you will see the site that you created.
To the right of your site name, it should say the expiry date of your website, with a button. Toggle that button to off, which will prevent your site from renewing automatically
Before you toggle that to off, on your Easywp dashboard you will see that it says “renews …”
After you toggle it to off, you will see that it says “expires…”
This means your free subscription will expire on that date.
Before your subscription expires, you will need to create a new free trial website, then transfer all the data to the new site. You do not need to create a new namecheap account in order to start a new free trial, you can do it from the same account.
You will need to repeat the process of starting new free trial, and transferring the content every month.
Continue reading to see how to easily transfer the data from an expiring site to a new site.
Transferring data of your site
Once your website is close to it’s expiry date you should receive an email from Namecheap telling you your website is about to expire. However, you should stay alert of your websites expiry date incase (although I doubt it) Namecheap decide to stop sending emails.
Once your site is close to its expiry date, repeat the above steps to create a new website.
Then go to your Easywp Dashboard, and click “WP admin” next to your site name.
This will open up your WordPress admin dashboard.
From the menu go to plugins, then click add new plugin
From the plugins page click the search bar and search for “WPvivid
Then install this plugin:
Then click activate
Make sure to do this for your expiring site, and your new site.
Once you’ve installed it on both websites, have both sites admin panels open on two different browser tabs.
On both sites, from the menu, click “WPvivid Backup”
You should see something like this:
On your new site, from the top, select “key”
Then, click generate
Copy the key, and then open your expiring site, and go to the “Auto-Migration” tab
Paste the key and click save
Then, make sure you have selected “Database + Files”
And click “Clone then Transfer”
The backup will be created and transferred to the new site.
Then, go to the new site, open the “Backup & Restore” tab and refresh the browser page.
Scroll down to the bottom, where you should see your backup file.
Click “restore”, then there will be another button that says “restore” click that as well then click ok to any confirmations.
Your site should then restore to how it was before. Then you can delete your old site from your Easywp dashboard, and if you were using your own domain, you can connect it to your new site.
And that’s its. you can use this process every month once your trial expires, to keep using free hosting.
Why might this be useful?
If you are looking to start your own e-commerce site, but aren’t sure whether your startup will be successful, and you don’t have much of a budget then this can be useful for you.
You can purchase a domain, which has a yearly renew price instead of monthly, and usually isn’t very high, often costing around £10 per year.
(Some companies even offer new customers prices of under, or little above a pound for the first year, and then a regular renewal price from the year after.)
Then you can use this free hosting method to create and host your website, and once your site starts gaining revenue, you can then start paying for the hosting.
Issues
If anything goes goes wrong while trying this, or you have any questions regarding this tutorial, please leave a comment, and I’ll try to get back to you, or, alternatively, leave a post on the forum.
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