Own your site in a weekend. Here’s the path, with real prices and no upsells.
Saturday morning: claim your ground
Register your domain. If you’re Canadian, get the .ca; it tells people where you are. Then pick hosting you control. A small VPS runs about $8–12/month and outperforms most $30/month “managed WordPress” plans. Our hosting guide walks through the options and what self-hosted actually means.
Saturday afternoon: light the fuse
Install WordPress (most hosts make this a one-click step). Choose a block theme and skip the page builder entirely: the block editor does the job now, with nothing extra to license, update, or get locked into. Then add the lean stack: seven plugins, each with one job.
Sunday: pages, then launch
Write five pages: home, what you do, who you are, proof you’re good at it, and how to reach you. Plain words beat clever ones. Point your domain, turn on HTTPS, and ship it. A live site you improve weekly beats a perfect site that launches never.
* Total damage: domain ~$15/year, hosting ~$10/month, theme and plugins $0. Analytics and email delivery are paid services when you add them — the stack page has the real numbers. The expensive part was never the software.
Keep it burning
Launching is the start. Our guides cover what comes next: securing the login, staying private by default, and growing without bloating.