How I Started A Blog

Over the last three months, I've been spending a lot of time playing CS:GO. Don't get me wrong, I know that there's nothing inherently wrong playing video games on your free time as long as it doesn't get in the way with everything else in your life. But after a 3-hour binge last Sunday, I felt this sudden feeling of guilt that usually comes when I know I could've spent my time a little bit better.

So I pulled the plug. I deleted CS:GO on my computer.

Now that I suddenly have a lot of free time, the obvious route for me was to fill it up with something. Not just anything. I want to use this newly found free time with something that is not mind-numbing as playing a first-person shooter game for 3 hours.

So what did I do? I decided to create a blog.

But with all the options to choose from, it gets extremely confusing at times.

After spending hours scouring the internet on guides how to start a website, I will share how I was able to sift through the noise and start mine.

1. Buy a domain name

First of all, I decided that if I'm going to do this, I want to do it right.

The first step is to have a proper domain name. I don't want to have an ugly domain name that has a .wordpress.com or a .blogger.com at the end. It looks amateur (I know I am lol) and it just doesn't feel right.

But of course it comes with a price, literally. You have to pay some money to have a custom domain name. The more "common" or "popular" the domain name is, the more expensive it would be. There are companies where you can buy domain names that also provides web hosting services as a bundle like Bluehost and DigitalOcean. (Web hosts are the one who stores the data from your website to a server)

I bought my domain name through Google Domains. The process was fairly simple and straightforward. As for the cost, I got a domain name for PHP 600 (roughly $12) which I will have to pay annually if I want to keep using it.

2. Choose a platform

After acquiring a domain name, the next step for me was to find a platform where would I create the content for my website.

It's not difficult to stumble upon Wordpress.org when trying to create a blog. After all it's the most popular software in this space and deservingly so, there's a lot of beautiful websites out there created with Wordpress.

However when I tried using it, I was overwhelmed by the variety of options and configurations to choose from. I also found its interface a bit clunky. It felt like too much work, I just needed to start my blog!

So I looked for other blogging platforms and that's when I found Ghost.org. The biggest selling point to me was its simplicity and elegance, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Wordpress have but it's more than enough for me.

Ghost's blogging software is free, you can use it alongside web hosting services like Bluehost and DigitalOcean. But I opted to use Ghost (Pro) because I just want to make things simple – blogging platform and web hosting rolled into one.

They have a 14-day trial (which is what I'm on right now), and after that I have to choose from their web hosting plans. The cheapest would be $9 (around PHP450) per month, which I will have to pay its equivalent amount for the whole year upfront. i.e $108 dollars (around PHP5400). I understand that it's pricey specially for a beginner like me, you can find cheaper deals out there. But for me it's more important to just get started and put myself out there rather than overthink every single thing.

As for CS:GO, I re-downloaded it and it's at 83% as I write this last sentence.