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How To: Have a Personal Website on a Tight Budget

Loralighte on June 21, 2020

Early in any freelancer, college grad, high school student, or any other developer's career, there is a need for a website. This website will need ...
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yokotobe profile image
yokotobe
  1. Register Domain
  2. Setup a web hosting on Raspberri Pi and put in your own home network
  3. Setup home router and forward http & https port to RaspPi IP address
  4. Set your own home IP Address to A record of domain's DNS
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kailyons profile image
Loralighte

Some ISP's will upcharge for stuff like this, and can make changes to the prices because of self-hosting. Some areas are also not as fortunate to have multiple ISP's available to switch.

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yokotobe profile image
yokotobe

Thanks to opinion, as long as website does not have high traffic, ISP would be OK.

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petoroland profile image
Roland Pető

AWS S3+CloudFront is an option too. You can buy a domain name using Route53, you get a free SSL certificate, because you are using an AWS service to host your content. If you would like to have dynamic content, then you can try out Lambda. With a personal webpage, you will definitely fit into the free tier. The only expense is the domain name.

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aaronktberry profile image
Aaron Berry

Yeah this is definitely an easy solution with alot of great documentation / articles on all of the different services involved.

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kailyons profile image
Loralighte

This is a solution I did not know myself! I will look into it when I can

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

A few notes:

  1. Your domain registrar DOES matter on the point of whether they'll protect your privacy by default or not. Gandi.net is one that does, although there are others. You should absolutely never have to pay for whois privacy! (Avoid GoDaddy like the plague for that reason, among others.) Also, be sure to shop around and make sure you're paying market price for a domain. You should only be paying once a year, you should be able to point the domain to anywhere you want, and there should be no limits on what ports you can use.

  2. You can host your own email on the domain name for free with any half-decent web host. It's relatively trivial to configure Postfix/Dovecot, either through a host-provided wizard, or manually configured yourself. Don't pay extra for this "feature" — it should cost you nothing extra on top of your ordinary hosting and domain name fees, so any upcharges for email are always deceptive.

  3. Linode is an excellent option. I pay $7/mo for a virtual host with regular backups, and I can do anything I want with it. They have handy configuration scripts to save you time on most common setups, including your standard HTTPS+email configurations.

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kailyons profile image
Loralighte
  1. I agree, and some do it terribly but I don't personally need Whois privacy personally.
  2. Right, but I went for an absolute budget of no more than $15 and avoided web hosts like the plague. Especially since most of the "half-decent" web host providers are awful. Especially Duda, Wix, Squarespace, Godaddy, and pretty much anything except Weebly, Linode, and... Yeah, I can't name anything else.
  3. Linode is a great option, but I did not mention it on purpose, as it hurts the budget.The only reason I didn't included.
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dtinth profile image
Thai Pangsakulyanont

Some domain registrars provide free email forwarding to your existing personal email address.

I take that also into consideration when considering where to buy domain names, because having this offering eliminated several problems:

  • Where to get an email service? No need, just use an existing one.
  • How to manage multiple inboxes? No need, the addresses are simply aliases.

Google Domains is one example.

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kailyons profile image
Loralighte

I do not like email forwarding, but yes that is an option.

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frogtd profile image
frogtd

With Google Domains's email forwarding you can send from it using Gmail.

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webdev_chen profile image
Uchena Miller

Good article. Right before I saw this post, I was doing a little research on web hosting and domain purchasing.

I was checking out godaddy.com but they're prices doesn't match my budget and it's a little confusing.

I need something custom and I know for sure those things doesnt come free so you gotta put a lil something.

Thanks for sharing this article✊🏾

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justtrey profile image
just-trey • Edited

If you don't expect a lot of traffic I have found VERCEL to be super easy to integrate with Github. This of course does not have email though. You'd need something separate for that.

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Jake Varness • Edited

Vercel is legit. I've thoroughly enjoyed using them for years now.

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Sebastian Vargr • Edited

Some reference numbers would be nice, fx. 5USD a month + domain price, can be done with a lot of Virtual server services. :)

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sebbdk profile image
Sebastian Vargr

Heck, got an old computer? Find a provider offering DDNS, then we are down to power cost + domain.

A raspberrie pi + a cache like cloud flare for scaling can get you quite far. :)

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kailyons profile image
Loralighte

Reference numbers are difficult to stitch together, but all of what I mentioned is pretty free. Even free for the domain you select.

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spiritupbro profile image
spiritupbro

vercel heroku netlify firebase github pages is your best friend honorable mention wordpress , ghost, etc

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roser137 profile image
roser137

yandex mail is also free as an alternative to zoho.

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kailyons profile image
Loralighte

That sentence got something mixed up, not sure why, it happened several times in the article when editing