How to get Wordpress working on Blacknight's Windows hosting

I recently setup a Wordpress site on my Blacknight Windows hosting account using their Web Applications tool. During the setup I had 2 issues that I could not find any blog posts on that I thought might be useful to other people out there who are trying to do the same thing as me.

My requirement was to install Wordpress on the root level of my domain.

Before I started to install Wordpress I setup my Windows hosting so that PHP would work on it. Using the Blacknight control panel I clicked on the domain I wanted to use and then clicked on the Website Configuration link. Click on the Install button to see a list of applications you can setup and choose Wordpress.

In this area, I selected PHP to run as 'Fast CGI application' and ActivePerl support to 'run as a CGI application'. I clicked save and moved onto the Web Application manager.

I selected Wordpress and was brought to the settings screen. Everything looked ok. I changed the folder to install to as '/' and entered the admin password I wanted to use. When I clicked save I was told that the folder had to contain a value so I had to leave it as the default '/Wordpress' option to get it to install for me.

At this point everything looked like it had installed. I had green lights in my Blacknight control panel and was told that the install was successful but when I went to my site I was seeing a 404.0 asp.net error. It turns out that you need to give the blacknight server about 5-15mins to install Wordpress for you. Even if you see the files in FTP you might not be able to go to the website for a few minutes. This is normal. Just give it a while and eventually your Wordpress install will appear for you on yourdomain.com/Wordpress.

Next up I wanted to move the Wordpress install to the root level. I tried following the guide from Wordpress on how to do this but it didn't seem to work for me. It turns out that you can move your Wordpress install by opening your Blacknight control panel and going back into the Web Application section and choosing the Wordpress link. On the bottom of the page is a button saying 'Change URL path'. Simply put in '/' (no quotes) and give it another few moments. Type in yourdomain.com and your Wordpress install will be visible for you.

As you can see, it all makes sense when you know how. the key is to allow the Web Applications to install to a /Wordpress folder, give it 5-10mins to set it up and then update the Wordpress install to the root level. Hopefully this will help some others out who might be scratching their heads as to why they are seeing 404 errors or wondering how to install to root on the Windows Hosting package.

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