Step 3 of Building a Website: Bluehost Email and FTP

So, in Step 2, I told you to purchase a Bluehost site, which I presume you have done by now and are now faced with this help screen:

What of this do you need? Right now, you really don’t need any of it except the website builder, but you may want to use some of these other services. Presumably you don’t need to transfer a website as you are building it for the first time now. If you have another website and want to move it here, then click on “Website transfer” and let Bluehost tell you how to do that.

You can use the “Email setup” to set up email addresses with your domain name, e.g., admin@poorpotsherd.com.  You may or may not need email at this point. I don’t need email right now, but I did set up some addresses.

All of your files for your site—your soon-to-be-WordPress files, your plugin files, and any other files you may want to upload to your site, can be accessed through the CPanel (the control panel) that comes up when you access your Bluehost account. The Bluehost file manager is here:

You as the administrator of the site have full access to these files. Clicking on the File Manager button takes you to these files.

If perchance you want to let someone else upload files to the site, you can create a special FTP account for them. That’s what the the FTP setup listed here is for:

The Bluehost file manager may have some issues. I was not able to upload a file type that I wanted to have on my site.  So because that did not work, I tried to find a workaround. The FTP manager “FileZilla” was recommended (by Bluehost) and I started to download that but became a little wary of it when my McAfee warned me about the site “Sourceforge” where the download was accessed. I decided to ignore that warning and download the file. Then Google Chrome didn’t want to unzip the downloaded file and gave me some sort of warning as well. So at that point I decided I didn’t need to upload that other file that Bluehost wouldn’t  upload, and abandoned the FileZilla attempt. But we may have to revisit FileZilla later. You can upload most files you need for your website through WordPress, so it doesn’t seem to be necessary right now.

The “Getting started articles” will give you a better walk through on how to actually set all these items up, so just access them for the step by step of setting up an FTP account or new email accounts.

I presume you only have one domain (the one you just set up), but if you want you can buy another domain name and add another website. The domain name and privacy service will cost you another $25 or so, but Bluehost lets me have five domains for free. I think the limitation on me is basically space on my site. So if I added more domains and more content, I would run out of space and have to purchase more.

Oh, while I am thinking about it, get yourself a notebook so you can keep track of the user names and passwords you are going to be generating. I decided to exercise caution and use different passwords for different logins (as you know you ought), but there ended up being a lot of them. So get ready to keep track of them.