by ᴋɪʀʙʏ ᴋᴏʜʟᴍᴏʀɢᴇɴ
Domain registrars, DNS, and hosting
How to set up your website the right way
It took me a while to set up the infrastructure that runs my website and email in a way that made me happy. There are a lot of crappy domain registrars, DNS providers, and web hosts out there. I’m finally in a place where I’m pleased with each component in my pipeline, so I thought I’d share my setup with the world.
Namecheap
Back in the day I, like many other people, used GoDaddy as my primary domain registrar. Quickly I learned that GoDaddy spends all of their money on fancy advertising instead of hiring UX engineers or product managers. Their support team was subpar as well during my time there.
Nowadays, I only use Namecheap for my domain needs. Namecheap is by far the best interface I’ve found for managing domains and it gets better every time I use it. They also always have great deals on new TLDs and searching for a great domain on their site is always a fantastic experience.
CloudFlare
Every domain registrar will provide you with the ability to configure your DNS settings for your domain, but no free nameserver service can really compare to CloudFlare. I don’t want to take too much time explaining all of the amazing things that CloudFlare can do for you because this video already does an incredible job.
If you watched that video, then you know about a lot of the awesome features that CloudFlare provides to its users for free. My absolutely favorite feature though, is surprisingly de-emphasized on CloudFlare’s site. The number one reason I use CloudFlare is because I never have to wait on DNS propagation.
GitHub Pages
Hosting a website can also be quite a pain. If you just need to host a static website, then there is no reason you need to pay for hosting. My personal favorite solution is GitHub Pages. I already use git to manage my website, so GitHub Pages makes updating my website as easy as git push. No more FTP, SSH, or any other three letter acronyms.
Setting it up
By now you should have a good high-level overview of how to setup your website, but there can be small implementation details that still make connecting the dots difficult. Here are all the steps you need to follow in order to utilize the above services:
1. Get your domain on Namecheap.
It doesn’t matter if you buy it directly or transfer it, but get your domain on Namecheap.
2. Add your site to CloudFlare.
On CloudFlare add your site, scan the current DNS records, and select the free plan. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be prompted with two nameserver addresses. Save these for the next step.
3. Point Namecheap to CloudFlare.
Go back to Namecheap, click the “Manage” button corresponding to your domain from the main “Dashboard” page. Under the “Nameservers” section click “Namecheap Basic DNS”, and then select “Custom DNS.” From here, enter the two nameservers you got from CloudFlare and click the green checkmark.
4. Check the nameservers.
Awesome, now go back to your site on CloudFlare and click “Recheck Nameservers.” This can take up to 24 hours, but often (especially with Namecheap) it only takes a few minutes.
5. Setup GitHub Pages.
Head over to GitHub and create a new repo called username.github.io, where username is your username on GitHub. From here you can push your static website up with the following commands:
# from your website directory on your local machine$ git init$ git add .$ git commit -m ‘Initial commit’# replace “<remote-url>” with the URL on your repo page on GitHub$ git remote add origin <remote-url>$ git push -u origin master6. Point your DNS to GitHub Pages.
You can now go back to your site on CloudFlare and click “DNS” at the top. From here you’re going to want to add a CNAME record. The first value (name) will be “@” and the second value (domain name) will be username.github.io, where username is your username on GitHub.
Unless you have some subdomains or other special circumstances, you can delete any other CNAME or A records off of CloudFlare. Just to be safe though, I’d suggest you backup your DNS records by clicking, “Advanced” and “Export.”
I personally don’t like the “www” that prefixes a lot of domains. I get rid of this by adding another CNAME record with first value “www” and second value username.github.io, where username is your username on GitHub.
7. Add a CNAME file on GitHub.
The last step in this process is to tell GitHub Pages about our domain. We do this by adding a file called “CNAME” to the root directory of our website’s repository on GitHub. To do this run the following commands:
# from your website directory on your local machine$ echo “<my-domain>” >;> CNAME # where “<my-domain>;” is your domain$ git add CNAME$ git commit -m ‘Add CNAME’$ git push origin masterIf you found this post useful or if you have any recommendations feel free to post a response here.
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