This is in continuation of a plan to host my own website. The plan here is to have a custom URL aka custom domain. There are plenty of domain sellers like Google Domains, GoDaddy Inc, Bluehost and many more. There are some that give away domains for free like Freenom and when it is free either you are the price or your PI data or PI data of the ones visiting your website is the price and that is something I'm not interested to take chances.
I didn't spend too much time on selecting the provider. But now after having the domain for a while and realized that few additional services would have added value to my website and I feel I should have researched more. Anyhow I ended up buying domain from Google Domains. Reason for choosing - my familiarity with Google environment and more importantly it was the first result on the search result page. This is when I realized how important it is to have your website SEO (search engine optimization) and SERP (search engine result page) optimization to generate good traffic on the site. There are plenty of case studies on search optimization and its worth a read. One interesting case study is Zomato and Swiggy SEO Strategy
In addition to above reasons, I also looked price of the domain that is not too expensive and also doesn't expose my email address in WHOIS domain lookups - I don't want to deal with spam!! Depending on the type of top level domain (TLD) viz. .com, .org, co.in, etc. registration price ranges from few hundreds per year to few lakhs of Rupees (few hundred thousands). Apparently, there are domain name investors who speculate on "catchy" domains and so there is high prices for some domains along with registration fee.
Okay, alright I have a custom domain for my website. What next?
Next step is to host your web site in a hosing service provider, in my case AWS and bind the custom domain and the hosting services Name Servers. Sounds simple !!
No, It wasn't simple for me. The goal was to build the website from SCRATCH. Before purchasing a domain I spent many hours learning HTML, CSS and to some extent JS. These three together are the real rabbit hole!!! With these three there is no starting point or ending point in learning and a million things can be added in-between. Not discouraging anyone trying to learn, there are plenty of resources available online. The website building took lot of time given that I worked on this project only during weekends. However I did develop one and you can find it my GitHub repository. I've integrated UiPath Bot to this CI/CD deployment - more details in Readme file in the repo. I used GitHub Pages for deployment of the website and not the custom domain. More of this in another blog.
Back to this domain topic ...
I already mentioned that there are may service providers that sell domains as well as provided additional services. These services specifically help in not requiring to learn HTML or CSS or JS to develop a website - they provide WordPress in addition to this they also provide services like website backup, SSL certificate to HTTPS your site, tools to boost SEO and SERP ranking, etc. - these I specifically came across in Bluehost, which I felt its a good bargain when I compared with AWS EC2 service. More over Bluehost is providing free domain for 1st year bundled along with web hosting service. At this point, it appears I'm at a logical point to conclude The Domain chapter.
The journey continues .. Stay tuned !!!
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