If you have your own hosted WordPress blog it is very important to back up WordPress. It may not happen often but things can and do go wrong. Your host might fail, your WordPress installation could get hacked or you might have made an error and need to roll things back to the way they were before.  So just to be safe back it up. Its easy to do and doesn’t cost anything so there is no reason not to.

Here are some tools to make it easier and carefree:

WP-DBManager

Use this plugin to back up, restore and optimize your database. Optimizing is a great feature because it will help your WordPress blog run faster and more efficiently especially as your blog grows larger in size. You can schedule your backups and have them stored on server or emailed to you. Basically this is a set and forget type of solution I like. I’m sure you will too. Additional features include things like dropping and emptying tables are also available, but use these with extra caution and always use the backup feature first.

So you figured out or heard you can play with WordPress

on your computer eh? Well here are some instructions on

how to install MAMP on your Mac (Mac OSX).

1) First, download MAMP from the Mamp website. The free

version will work just fine. You do not need the MAMP

pro version.

2) Second, download the latest WordPress version from

WordPress.org

3) Go the Applications/MAMP/htdocs folder. From here you can

create a directory for your WordPress installation.

Unzip WordPress if it isn't already and move it in its

entirety to the htdocs folder. If you want, you can also rename

the WordPress folder to whatever you want to call this test blog.

I'm going to rename mine "test" for this example.

3) Now launch the MAMP program by clicking the MAMP application

within the Applications/MAMP folder. You should see a screen

like below:

If the lamps next to Apache Server and MySQL server are red then

the servers are not running (pictured above).

You can easily start and stop the servers by pressing the

appropriate button. The lamps will turn green once the servers

are up and running.

Easy for Beginners/New Bloggers and Those New To WordPress

For someone new to hosting and WordPress Dreamhost is the perfect place to start out. Their documentation and auto-installers make getting started with WordPress easy as pie and depending on your setup, you can have them automatically update your wordpress installation as upgrades become available. All the other common web hosting features are included in their shared hosting package.

Tech Support

Dreamhost’s customer service/tech support is also pretty good. They are available by the forums and email which is a lot more than I can say about some of the other providers and the wait isn’t that long at all. Online chat is also available but it costs extra if you are on a shared server. If you upgrade to their virtual private hosting, chat support is free.