You’ve got a new idea for a product, or a store, or maybe just a neat pun. So it’s time to buy a domain, isn’t it?
That’s the easy part. Put in your credit card info, add a reminder for next year so you remember to renew it, and you’re set. But that’s far from the end! There’s a lot of work to make sure everything is set up correctly, and the best time to do it is right now!
I am not affiliated with any of these services, and I don’t make any money on these recommendations!
Set up nameservers
Before getting into the weeds, I highly recommend immediately signing up for a free CloudFlare account and pointing the nameservers at their service.
I recommend this because their anti-DDoS service is simply the …
You’ve got a new idea for a product, or a store, or maybe just a neat pun. So it’s time to buy a domain, isn’t it?
That’s the easy part. Put in your credit card info, add a reminder for next year so you remember to renew it, and you’re set. But that’s far from the end! There’s a lot of work to make sure everything is set up correctly, and the best time to do it is right now!
I am not affiliated with any of these services, and I don’t make any money on these recommendations!
Set up nameservers
Before getting into the weeds, I highly recommend immediately signing up for a free CloudFlare account and pointing the nameservers at their service.
I recommend this because their anti-DDoS service is simply the best in the game, and their API makes a lot of stuff very straightforward down the line.
While you’re in the domain control panel, also be sure to check if whois privacy is enabled.
There are plenty of other free DNS hosting services out there. Just be sure that whatever you choose has MFA on login, a well documented API, and the ability to import & export records. A responsive support team is also a huge bonus (if you can find one).
Set up email
The first decision is if you want to be able to send outbound email as your domain. Either way, you’ll be able to receive inbound mail.
If you don’t need to send email as the domain, a service like CloudFlare lets you route all inbound mail messages to an external mailbox. This is also free, and is a great way to get up and running.
If you do want to send email as the domain, you’ll need to pay for hosting. My favourite options:
- mailbox.org - $2.5 EUR/month
- Fastmail - $5 USD/month
Other, often costlier, hosting is also available via Microsoft and Google’s business email hosting offerings. I wouldn’t recommend that unless it is believed that the project will soon grow to more than ~5 team members in the short term.
Set up DMARC monitoring
While setting up the email service, be sure to configure DKIM and DMARC records. For example:
"v=spf1 include:your.mail.host.here ~all"
Another key piece of this is to set up DMARC reporting. When another mail server recieves a message from your domain, it will resolve the TXT record for _dmarc. use the instructions to decide how to handle incoming messages. For example:
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine;
In addition to deciding whether or reject, quarantine, or allow messages that don’t comply with the dmarc policy, it can also be configured to send reports.
I recommend setting up a service like dmarcreport to analyze these reports and help alert you if there is a problem with your domain’s configuration or potential abuse by an attacker.
To set this up, modify the DMARC record to send reports to the service:
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:[email protected]; ruf=mailto:[email protected]; fo=1
After this is configured, the service will send a weekly report with how many emails were accepted for each destination service.
Get a website live
Next, it’s time to get a website setup!
The easiest, and costliest, is to use a web builder service. Squarespace is the most common of these. They’re fast and easy to work ok, but they do come with a steep cost ($20/mo ++), and are not possible to export for use with another host.
A slightly cheaper option is to use a wordpress host:
- wordpress.com - $10 USD/mo
- bluehost.com - $5 USD/mo
- whc.ca - $3 CAD/mo
These are much more portable and customizable, but take a bit more work.
For a more frugal approach, it’s also possible to do all the building yourself!
With a static site generator like hugo or jekyll it’s you can get something barebones set up quite quickly. There are a wide variety of themes that are quick to get started with.
To host these, you can often get free hosting for static sites:
- cloudflare pages - $0/mo
- DigitalOcean - $0/mo
- Netlify - $0/mo
All of these support premium features at a higher cost, but simple web hosting and TLS are free. I’ve used all three of these in the past with great results.
Another option is to set up an account on Oracle, Google, or AWS cloud and use the free tier to host your site. It’s a bit more work, but can be a great learning experience. Just be sure to have a plan for when things go wrong.
Get your site searchable
Once your site is ready to go, it’s important to set up search indexing.
Google and Bing will both crawl and index your site as they discover links from other sites, but it’s much better to set it up deliberately.
After submitting a sitemap, you should start getting clicks and impressions in not too long.
Setting up the search consoles is also important because if your site gets flagged for spam or malware, that’s where you’ll see it and submit an appeal.
Other free monitoring services
- mxtoolbox.com offers free weekly reports on your domain’s blacklist status
- Google Postmaster Tools will help diagnose mail deliverability problems
And in about an hour, your domain is up and running! I’ve done this exact procedure a couple dozen times, and each time I learn something new. But, the most important thing is to set up as much as you can right away. There will never be an easier time than now. Moving email or web hosting can be a real pain, so be sure to make a cost and convenience conscious decision!