How to Install a Wordpress Blog on LunarPages
In its newest Control Panel, LPCP, LunarPages has abandoned the Fantastico scripts which allowed you to easily install Wordpress on your site. In fact, due to a few bad decisions Lunar Pages made, this new tutorial is more important than the old one. It no longer takes two minutes, but it is still doable.
If you have an old account, you may still be able to use Fantastico to install. Great. Otherwise, they have a “WebApps Pool” which allows you to install Wordpress, but it’s not updated as often as Fantastico and at the time of writing it appears to be about 5 versions of Wordpress behind!! If you do use it to install, be sure to upgrade right away, using Wordpress’s built-in upgrader, before you do anything else.
Otherwise, follow the instructions to learn how to install Wordpress on Lunarpages (which differs a little from installing it on other hosts).
If you know how to set up LunarPages but your database hostname isn’t working, click here to go to the relevant section.
While it may take a little more than 5 minutes, you can still install Wordpress quickly and manually on LunarPages without too much technical expertise.
Step 1. Create a MySQL Database
In your LPCP, scroll down to the Databases section and click on the MySQL Manager.
In MySQL Manager, you can create a database user and database, then Grant Access for the user to the database, with ALL privileges. Your database user and database names will be preceded by whatever your account nickname is on LunarPages. It will look something like nick4_. Your database user and database name will look like nick4_testuser and named the database nick4_testdb.
Be sure to write down the username, password, and database name.
It also has a space for your Hostname. Let this autopopulate and forget it (see next paragraph).
THIS IS NOT THE HOSTNAME YOU WILL NEED. Unlike most hosts, Lunarpages loses points on the “sane and simple” level. It wouldn’t matter if the information were made plainly available in LPCP or in the wiki, but this has been a problem for a number of my readers and it even took me a short while to figure out.
Substep A. Find Your Database Hostname
If you are using shared hosting, at least, your LunarPages MySQL databases are on a different server than your other files. Lunarpages used to let you fill in ‘localhost’ for your DB_HOME in wp-config.php, but now requires a specific server, so you have to know the IP address if your database server. The IP address will look something like 229.237.233.32 (not mine or a client’s).
How to Find Your Database Hostname
- Go to the main page of your LPCP and scroll down to databases.
- Click on PhpMyAdmin (sailboat icon on the right side).
- It may ask you to fill in your login information again, do so.
- Now you’re in phpMyAdmin for your hosting. Though the url still has the same IP address as your LPCP, the very top of the page will say Server: 229.237.233.32 (only your IP address).
Here’s a screenshot of what this looked like for one client, but with most of the IP address blacked out for privacy:
It’s at the very top of the page, a little bit left of center. You’ll see that it probably shares many of the same digits as your LPCP IP address, but it’s got a few different ones too. If it’s identical, then your database & files are on the same server.
Write down your phpMyAdmin IP address as its printed after “Server.” This is what you will use below to replace ‘localhost’ in the wp-config.php file.
You’ve already down your database name, your database username, and your password. Now that you have the hostname too, you’re ready to continue.
Step 2. Download Wordpress Software and Edit wp-config.php
You can download the most recent release of Wordpress here. If you’re reading this tutorial, then the .zip version is the right one for you. Unzip the folder.
Change the file name of wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php. Open the file in Notepad (or Notepad ++) and edit the following rows:
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
Make sure that you leave the '' around the information you enter.
If you scroll down, you can also type in some gibberish in the Authentication Unique Keys, where it says: put your unique phrase here.
Step 3. Upload Wordpress Files and Install
Using an FTP client, upload all the files & folders inside the Wordpress folder into the main folder of your domain. For your primary domain (the one under which you registered your account), this is public_html. For other domains, it’s the folder inside public_html which coinicides with the name of your domain or subdomain.
If you upload the entire folder “wordpress” into public_html, then your blog address will be http://yourdomain.com/wordpress, which is why you only want to upload the contents unless you plan to have your blog in a subfolder of your domain.
Now, go to your domain. You will be redirected to an installation page, http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php. If that shows up, then you’re good to go! If it doesn’t, make sure you’ve entered all the data in wp-config.php correctly, make sure you’ve put ' ' around the entries, and double check the IP address of your database hosting.
This tutorial is specifically for LunarPages. Some other hosts offer Fantastico or simply allow you to use ‘localhost.’
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