I’m in the process of transferring my blog over to my newly purchased JohnWarda.com domain name and last night I ran into a bit of trouble during my WordPress installation.

First of all, I’m going to use a WordPress blog on my domain, so I downloaded the files from WordPress. Once downloaded I followed the WordPress installation instructions and changed the information in the wp-config file. I changed the name of the database and the username I created for WordPress.

The next part says that 99% of the time you don’t have to change the “DB_HOST” but as it turned out I was one of the lucky 1%.

So anyways, I saved the changes that I did make to the wp-config file and uploaded everything to my site. When I checked to see if it worked, I got a nasty “Error establishing a database connection” message.

So not realizing what the problem was I just went back to WordPress.org and typed the error message in. That brought up a bunch of results, which led me back to the installation instructions and the “DB_HOST” part again.

I now realized that this must be the problem and I would need to change it and see how it goes. On the installation page it has a link to a page of what these “possible DB_HOST Values” codes could look like for different hosting companies.

I found the example for my 1and1.com hosting company, found and copied the code from my control panel and then pasted it into my wp-config file.

Once I uploaded it I had to jump up and celebrate because it worked like a charm.

So if you are thinking of setting up a WordPress blog on your own domain, keep this experience in mind and it might save you a lot of time and hassle.