GreenGeeks Hosting Review 2020

hey everyone it’s me lisa from oshiblogs.com today i want to talk to you about setting up a wordpress blog on green geeks web hosting green geeks is one of the very few web hosts that i recommend and i primarily recommend them for two reasons one they are super affordable they’re about on par with bluehost and siteground which are two of the most popular web hosts for bloggers right now their plans start at 3.95 a month although you can
occasionally find a sale to get hosting even cheaper than that which is pretty darn awesome and the second reason i love green geeks is because they use renewable energy to host uh everything that they host running data servers to run websites takes up a lot of power but using renewable energy they use 300 green web hosting is awesome and something i hope that other web hosts will begin to follow in the future but for now we have green geeks
which is affordable and doing good things for the environment which is awesome so in addition to being affordable green geeks offers a lot of great um things that bloggers are sure to love for instance when you sign up with green geeks you’ve got a free domain name um for a year which is awesome because domain names typically cost anywhere from 11 to 15 a year unless it’s a premium name which is so that’s a nice little freebie they throw in if
you’re already being hosted with someone else they will migrate your website for free so let’s say you are currently hosted with the world’s worst uh web host in my opinion that would be bluehost and you decide you want to switch to green geeks green geeks will go ahead and do that for you for free so that’s one less thing you’re gonna have to worry about because nobody likes worrying about uh migrating their website because there’s a lot that
goes into it there’s a one-click wordpress installer which we will go through here in just a minute uh their sites work really fast they’re e-commerce ready if you want to do that and they offer 24 7 support they really are awesome i’ve been working with them for quite a while and even hosting some websites with them and i really like what they’re doing and highly recommend them to all of you so i’m going to show you how to get your wordpress
blog going with them and to do this uh video i’m going to assume you’ve already gone through the process of signing up with them you’ve clicked get started here you’ve entered all your information and we are going to jump in here at the point that you get an introductory email from them this email from green geeks is really going to be your green geeks bible it has all of the information you are ever going to need to run your green geeks account
and having set up many websites this is one of the most thorough and detail-filled emails i’ve received like this so let’s just go through this really quickly you’ll see the account overview tells you how much you’re paying per month all of that good stuff control panel and ftp login details this is the website you’re going to need or the link to basically log into your green geeks account which we will go through that in just a minute ftp you’re
probably not going to use ftp very often i will be honest with you but that one or two times you do need to access the ftp for instance let’s say you want to change your permalink structure you are really going to love that green geeks gives you this information because most web hosts do not and you have to set it up or you have to go search for it the fact that they give it to you right here is so awesome i can’t even tell you and i know that
sounds silly because you’re really not going to use it that often so you might just have to trust me on that that that is a big perk name servers here let’s say you are hosting your domain with someone else like namecheap which is where i get all of my domain names from you are going to need to go into namecheap and direct your urls to point to this website these name service basically that is telling the internet in all of its magical glory that
i don’t fully understand that this is where they’re going to go need to go to find where your website is hosted green geeks does have its own website builder i don’t know anything about this it’s not free plans start at 3.95 per month they offer templates that you can choose from drag and drop site builders all of that good stuff my guess is that this would be an option similar to like wix or squarespace for instance if you have a store you’re
just looking for something quick and easy i’m not going to go through this with you because i am all about the wordpress but in case you’re looking for something different they do have that option available for you as we talked about they do offer free migration services if your blog is already hosted elsewhere uh they will also help you transfer your domain name to them or at least tell you how to do that like say if you’re at namecheap and
you’d rather store your domain now with green geeks you can go ahead and do that there’s really no need to do that but just in case if you love green geeks and you’d like to become a green geeks affiliate which i am you can earn up to a hundred bucks per referral which is awesome and they make it pretty easy for you to go in there and get signed up as an affiliate and the one last thing i want to show you here is email settings they give you this
information so let’s say my url i’m using here smarterhomelifestyle.com let’s say i set up an email address lisa at smarterhomelifestyle.com i could now use this information to be able to check that email address right from gmail which is what i do with all of my email accounts so we have this information we’re going to go ahead and click on greengeeks.com forward slash login which i have already done right here that will bring you to your
dashboard your green geeks dashboard which is pretty basic there’s not really a whole lot going on here at all which is fine the main thing you need is right down here at the bottom of the screen it’s the cpanel login not all web hosts make it easy to find cpanel so i really applaud green geeks for making that pretty much the only thing in your account because cpanel for lack of a better term is really the mothership when it comes to your website
it’s where you’re going to be able to access all of your files make all of your changes install wordpress all of that good stuff so you need to be able to access it um easily and since that’s really all you can do from the dashboard it can’t get much easier than that if you haven’t been in cpanel before it might scare you there is a lot of stuff going on in cpanel as you can see here although i promise you you are never going to need to touch
most of it in fact i promise you can ignore most of this i’ve used to see panel for quite a long time and there are still many things i’ve never used probably many of this stuff i am never going to use and that’s okay the basic things you will use though in your own cpailing cpanel account is the file manager if you ever need to update any files or let’s say you have a this might be a little advanced but you never know let’s say you have a plugin
that goes bad and it shuts down your account it shuts down your website if suddenly you can access your website because let’s say jetpack goes crazy you could log into cpanel go into the file manager delete jetpack and hopefully gain access to your website again i know that sounds crazy but um and hopefully you never actually have to do that but having access to file manager is pretty key aside from that like i said if you ever need to access
your ftp luckily those are right there and green geeks was awesome and gave you the information you’ll need to log into that cpanel always gives you some seo and marketing tools that you can check out some of these are going to be free some of them are going to be paid they’re probably worth checking into although i’ll be honest with you i don’t spend much time in this at all but you never know if you’ll find a good thing in there domains this
will help you buy new domains add on domains redirects all of that good stuff you can do that right there email if you need to set up your email account which of course i always recommend like i said if i were going to set up lisa smarterhomelifestyle.com that’s where i would do that there setting up an email address that goes with your domain name just looks more professional as you reach out to and work with companies so you definitely want to
do that metrics you can find that here visitors all that good stuff although i will warn you google analytics is really the industry standard for bloggers when it comes to analytics so you’re still going to want to install that on your site and it is going to depress you because the analytics you get from cpanel here are usually going to be much higher than what you will get with google analytics that is because google analytics takes out all the
bots and fake visitors to your site that um these metrics are not going to be able to do so google analytics is going to look like you have fewer visitors but the visitors you do have are going to be real visitors and that’s what companies want to see security i’ve never really used any of this stuff but if you want to get an ssl certificate which is the https instead of http you can look into that here software there are various programs you can
use i haven’t used most of these uh so i’m not really going to go into that with you but that is something you can explore if you need to advanced i’ve never really used any of this preferences you can change your password change the language if you need to things like that so what we are going to focus on though is we want to get wordpress installed on your website so we are going to go down here to the softiculus apps installer which i assume
is how you say softiculus not really sure and that will bring you here where you’ll find a whole bunch of different things you can install on your website we are doing wordpress which is the first uh script or app here so we’re gonna hover on wordpress and we’re just gonna hit install that will bring up this great screen which will basically walk you through really quickly installing wordpress on your blog you’re going to choose the protocol we
are so you could use http um or http colon forward slash forward slash www dot or if you have an ssl certificate you can do the https so we’ll just leave that at the basic the domain is already set up so that will be smarterhomelifestyle.com you don’t need to worry about in directory site settings um you can do this here or you can do it when you get into the wordpress dashboard um there’s like i said no reason to do this here but it’s the site
name and site description if you were going to use multi-site you could enable that here admin account this is the information you’re going to need to log into your wordpress account obviously you never ever ever want to keep your uh username as admin because people are going to try to hack into your site it is guaranteed this is going to happen pretty much from the moment wordpress is installed on your site admin is the username they are going
to try to hack into your site using so please never ever use admin i’ve used my email address or my full name you can do whatever you want in this instance i’m gonna make it uh lisa oshiblox that will be my username password you can have them give you a password if you want that’s fine uh not the strongest but that’s okay admin email make sure it goes to an email address that you can currently access you can always change this later but i’m going
to make it my my oshiblox email there you can choose a language you can select a couple of different plugins that they will automatically install for you uh limit login attempts i always like because it limits the number of times the hackers can access your site before they’re blocked and w forms lite i’m not as familiar with but it’s a contact form so we’ll go ahead and let them install that advanced options you don’t really need to worry about
too much here although if you want to you can enable auto upgrades what this does is if wordpress releases an update to the software it can automatically upgrade wordpress it can upgrade um wordpress plugins and it can also do themes auto upgrade is awesome because just in case you don’t log into your site or something and miss an upgrade it can take care of that for you on the other hand you may not want to do it if you want to have more control
if you want to know when something’s upgraded for instance that could be handy like let’s say there’s a jetpack plug-in upgrade and suddenly your site’s not working after you upgrade the plug-in well you’re going to know that it was the jetpack plug-in if you are the one that upgrades it if you enable auto-upgrade you may not know that that is a long description and this is something you can also reconfigure later but definitely something to
think about personally i do do auto upgrade because i think it’s easier but that’s completely up to you then you’re going to go down here and select a theme obviously you can change your theme later or you can you can keep one of these obviously there’s no right or wrong way but you do need to install a theme for them to install wordpress so from there we’re just going to go ahead and click install you can watch here it should install pretty
quickly because it’s a clean install and just like that we’re done so assuming i’ve done everything correctly we can go ahead and click on this url and it should take us to our new website which it does so there is a very basic wordpress website that obviously needs some updating and the administrative url so we can get to the wordpress dashboard you can click on that there and now you can get to work um updating your website so that is that is
it um that took us like two minutes after the point of uh purchasing hosting with green geeks they make it super easy thanks to that one click wordpress install and once you get wordpress on there you can upgrade to any themes that you buy or really start uh writing your posts obviously you can really start making the website your own and it i mean honestly you can have this done in just a few minutes time if you were to start right now so i
highly recommend green geeks they are good people they’re doing good things for the environment which is awesome and they are super affordable so if you’re looking for an awesome web host i highly recommend checking them out and getting started uh you can be done in just a few minutes so you can’t really beat that so that is that with this green geeks wordpress setup i will put the links uh to getting set up in the comments below and be sure to
let me know if you have any questions and i will do what i can to help you hope you’re all having a great day and i will talk to you again soon bye