First Step

Since the feature was available, I figured I'd start a blog to record my experience as a total newb trying to get his first site up and running.

I purchased a Premium membership on Monday, even though I was unsure I'd ever realize the entire value of it.

Next I chose to have my site hosted by Arvixe since they were a Boonex recommended hosting company and they had very good reviews on some of the more reputable hosting company review sites. This was around mid-afternoon on Monday and the site didn't get set up until Tuesday morning. I never got an email confirming that my site had been set up, so I called them around noon and found out I had fat-fingered my email address (no confirm email address in their sign-up form). The customer service rep was very good, though, and I had my confirmation moments later.

Once that was done, I thought of a domain name I liked better than the one I registered with Arvixe so I registered it through my GoDaddy account and set the DNS servers to that of my Arvixe server, then registered the add-on domain at Arvixe. Pretty easy if you've done it before.

It was about 2:00 in the afternoon on Tuesday when I submitted a ticket to have Boonex install Dolphin as part of my Premium membership. Igor accepted it about 2 hours later, which I thought was OK, but then I noticed that he usually completed his installation tickets in about 66 hours. That worried me, but I decided to give him a day or so and see what happened.

After waiting 29 hours (it was now around 7:00 PM Wednesday), I decided to give it a shot on my own. The Arvixe rep had told me that I could install Dolphin with Softastic on my cPanel so I did. Ten minutes later, Dolphin was installed on my new Domain and I had entered my license key. I had a fresh new install of Dolphin 7.0.5 waiting for me to get to work. Boy, did I feel stupid. BoonEx charges $99 for that? Must be nice to be able to take such advantage of us newbs!

Anyway, the default installation of Dolphin 7.0.5 looks very nice, by far the nicest and most modern interface of any of the other community software platforms that I looked at before deciding on Dolphin. So, I'm happy about that.

So, time to press on. If anyone has any "if I'd have known then what I know now" advice for me, I'd love to hear it!