It's very easy to get hosting nowadays as many new organizations have started giving very easy methods to host your website and that too for free!! These include
- Netlify - 100GB Bandwidth + 300 Build Minutes ( free Version )
- Vercel - 100GB Bandwidth
Both Netlify and Vercel give you 100GB of bandwidth free (although that's a soft limit for Vercel). Netlify sells additional bandwidth at $20/100 and Vercel gives you 1 TB with the Pro plan (also a soft limit).
- surge sh - (No limit mentioned on the official website)
- Heroku - (550-1,000 dyno hours per month)
There are much more alternatives that provide free hosting when you pay for a domain, one being the example of hostinger, goDaddy
Now as you have got free hosting, we have to compromise with the domain name as netlify provides its own domain and also vercel and same for surge. But they provide an alternative to add in your custom domain!
What are the steps to add in your custom domain?
Step 1: Either buy your own domain or just grab one from the Github Education Pack, the most famous being from here, Just go and register for the GitHub education pack from your college official email id.
Step 2: Now that you have purchased the domain, you have to create CSR (Certificate Signing Request), what does this mean? It's a sort of way to verify your domain and you have issued it and a handshake between the hosting and domain as they are from different organizations. Just go here and generate CSR, Private Key, and Certificate
Step 3: Now that you have grabbed the three important data. There will be an option in your hosting dashboard with a custom domain to verify the private key and CA certificates and certificate.
What is a CA certificate or Intermediate certificate: It's basically the SSL certificate issued by the domain provider when you paste the CSR generated in the domain dashboard.
When you are done with this, there is one last step
Step 4: Change the nameservers. For name .com it provides ns1 nameservers but netlify provides dns1 nameservers. First, delete all the nameservers on the domain dashboard and paste all the nameservers provided by the hosting agency. This is the critical step as this causes a clash between the two nameservers provided by domain and hosting websites.
Now you will be mostly done and your website should be live on the new domain. If you find any issue don't hesitate to contact me 👍
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