Oh, Network Solutions, let me count the ways I despise thee. From your overpriced services, to your impossibly cluttered control panels, to your evil domain sniping practices…

It’s a general rule for me that if I’m installing WordPress on a host I’m not familiar with, I will not use the automatic script but instead will opt to install manually.

Side Note: When at all possible, we try to use WebFaction for hosting – we’ve been using WebFaction here at Mad Lab for all our hosting for a few years now, and especially for our Django and WordPress projects, WebFaction has been nothing short of fantastic. If you’re looking for a host, give them a try. Their control panels aren’t exactly the most intuitive as they’re geared towards the more tech savvy customer, but their customer support is second to none. Final disclaimer: if you do sign up, please.use one of the links in this paragraph, and Mad Lab gets a tiny cut of what you spend. In closing, USE THIS LINK.

So back to it. Network Solutions forces WordPress into a subdirectory, which can wreak havoc with your .htaccess rewrites (I know it can be done, but why complicate matters?). So in order to put WP into your domain root, you have to do it manually. Not going to walk you through this… the part that’s a bit of a bear is the wp-config file. Normally, you’d put in ‘localhost’ as the DB server. In this case, Network Solutions needs the IP to the database server. So you need to go to your Network Solutions control panel, find the DB you created (manually of course), and find either the host alias or the IP to that DB server, and when creating your wp-config file, replace ‘localhost’ with that value.

Simple little fix, but knowing this will save you all sorts of time looking for the right way to connect the database to the WordPress installation.