So I bought a domain name on Google Domains and connected it to my freely hosted website on Repl.it.
Repl.it tells you to attach a cname record to their website with www. cname, but then I realized users will always have to type www. in front of my domain name to find my website! Not good.
So I added a synthetic record to direct root to www., only to find out that it only works for http and not https. Gasp!
After some digging, to enable SSL I need to find the IPv4 address of the repl.it hosted website. Thankfully, a quick Google search brought me to a discussion with people asking the same questions. All you only needed is the command nslookup [your repl's website] to find the server's IP address.
Then I signed up on cloudflare. I expected a lot of work, but the onboarding was super user-friendly. I only needed to enter my domain name and add an A-record pointing to the Repl.it IP address.
Then I update my domain records on my domain registrar to the ones provided by cloudflare.
Within seconds my domain was working with full SSL! All hail free hosting!
Note: someone mentioned that the IP address might change on Repl.it, so I've since moved to free hosting on Vercel.
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