armur
Regular Member
- Jul 20, 2017
- 460
- 249
Hey, guys! I grew up in what I would like to refer to as the 'Golden Age of Torrenting'. It was the mid to late 2000s when people no longer bought cassette tapes and the streaming platforms of today hadn't been started yet. Oh, and Software As A Service (SAAS - I hate that term
) wasn't a thing either. So naturally, I had this 'If it's not hardware, you don't pay for it' mindset ingrained in me.
Well, fast forward 10 years and I now run a few online businesses and pay each month for a bunch of SAAS, I use legit copies of image editing software (2010 me would so look at me and sulk that I've gone over to the Dark Side), I pay for hosting, and a whole bunch of things. Hell, I even pay an accountant to work part-time to handle all these payments and take care of bookkeeping.
Anyway, I still do like to go the free-route whenever possible. After all, there are numerous free and open source solutions that do a great job. I've been setting up a few test sites these last few weeks and discovered that you could, in fact, go from A to Z when starting a new website using such free services. Another big surprise to me was that these services are actually good and reliable - now that's something 2010 teenage me with no money would be proud of having discovered.
I'll put in a small Table of Contents here, so if you just need a free solution for one particular aspect of opening a website, you can jump straight there.
Table of Contents
- Free Domain Registration
- Subdomain.com / Com.nu
- Freenom
- Free Hosting + Content Management System
- Google Cloud Platform Free Tier + Wordpress
- Free E-Commerce Platform
- Free Shopify Store
- Free Woocommerce Store
- Free SSL
- What is SSL?
- Free Cloudflare SSL
- Free Let's Encrypt SSL
- Free Custom Domain Business Email
- Free Zoho Business Email
- BONUS: Free Plugins and Tools to Up Your SEO Game
Whoa! Looks like this is going to be one looong post. Before I get started, I definitely have to thank @Sherb and @LukaB for their posts on building websites and brands. Those helped me build my first couple of sites and I'm forever grateful. Plus, there's a ton of useful tidbits in those posts that are definitely invaluable. You can find LukaB's post here and Sherb's post on building a brand here.
So let's get started, folks!
Free Domain Registration
Domain is just a fancy name for a website address. .COM / .NET / .ORG domains are the preferred ones and usually cost anywhere upwards of $5 per year. If you're planning to start a web store for long term projects or if it's a website to showcase your portfolio, I'd highly recommend that you spend a little and get the .COMs and .NETs.
I was super impressed by @Matt707 recent thread on selling MAGA hats and wanted to try something similar. So I'll take up that project and set up a complete website for free now. I'll take screenshots, post them here, and explain the process as and when I do it so that it's easy for you guys to replicate. When it comes to free domain registration, there are two good options available. Let's take a look at how to set up domains in both these options.
Psst. : My recommendation would be to use subdomain.com
The other option - freenom, is a bit, nah, very unreliable.
Subdomain.com / Com.nu
Subdomain.com and com.nu don't actually offer you free domains but they rather offer you free subdomains on their super short domains including com.nu. So you will get addresses like 'domain.com.nu' which doesn't look too bad if you ask me. However, like everything that's free, there's a small catch - you'll only be able to redirect the subdomain. This means that your URLs will look neat and clean when you share them on Social Media and other forums but when customers actually reach your site, they will see only your hosting's IP address. For short term projects, this shouldn't be too big an issue - most visitors will probably think that you've made some configuration error and so the IP address is showing up.
Note: With this method of redirecting without actually using a proper domain, you will not be able to set up SSL (usually recommended -> read on to find out why) or a custom domain email id (eg. [email protected]). So I'll reiterate this again, if you're building a brand, just bite your lips, spend the $5 and get a domain for yourself.
So for this project, since we will be selling hats, let me look up catchy words related to it and see if they're available.
Enter the word of your choice, select the domain, and click on the Check button. If it's available, sign up for an account and login using the email and password that you receive by email. On the next screen, click on 'Create Redirect'.
On the next page, just give your project a name and select a category. Hit Next.
On the next screen, we will need to enter the redirect URL. We'll need to pause here (just keep the page in a separate tab) and set up the free hosting for our website.
Once we finish setting up the hosting, we will switch to this page and enter the IP address of our host here in the Destination URL.
Freenom
Freenom.com is a company that offers free domains on various (less popular, of course) extensions such as .TK, .ML, .GA, .CF, and .GQ. However, you should know that they aren't domain registrars who register the domain in your name. Rather, they have the domain registered in their name and simply give you free access for a year. Also, their primary source of income is by simply taking back the domains that are generating good traffic and replacing the sites on these domains with pages filled with ads. So don't be surprised if, one fine morning, you find your website replaced by a wall of ads.
That being said, these domains work just fine for short term projects (less than 6 months) since you aren't going to be using SEO for traffic. Oh, and before I forget Search Engines usually don't index these domains as well.
To get started, let me look up catchy words related to hats and see if anything's available.
Well, what do you know! First time lucky and all domains are available for registration right now. Let me go ahead and pick one. Or maaaybe, I'll just go ahead and register all five
Shrewd guy eliminating potential copycat competition - pat on the back for myself.
Once you select the domain(s), hit the checkout button. On the next screen, change the duration to 12 months free and hit Continue.
You'll be taken to the Review and Checkout page. Scroll down and Login if you're already registered with Freenom or enter your email address and hit Verify My Email Address.
You'll get an email with the verification link. Click that and it will take you to the Checkout Page where you need to enter your details. Enter the details, check the 'Accept Terms' checkbox and click the Complete Order button.
You'll get the order confirmation message and your domain should be registered. You'll still need to add 'A Records' to point the domain to your hosting's IP address. Let's get into that after we've finished setting up our website's hosting.
Free Hosting + Content Management System
Before we dive into the depths of setting up free hosting, let's first understand how websites actually work. A website is nothing but a collection of pages that exist in a computer somewhere in the World. That's right, on a computer! This computer runs 24x7 and is always connected to the Internet and has what is called a server software (usually apache or ngnix) installed on it. This server software simply gives visiting browsers the pages that they request for viewing. Thus they enable visitors to view the pages stored in that computer. Simple as that
It is very much possible to set up this server software on a spare computer, connect it to the internet and keep it running 24x7, but why bother when there are companies (web host providers) who do it for you. Plus, since they do it at a large scale, their prices are cheaper(or in our case - free!) as well.
Cloud Computing (Amazon's AWS, Google Cloud Platform or GCP, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, etc. ) are all exactly the same thing as well. These companies just have computers running in their server farms that you can rent and use for your projects. As surprising as it may sound...
Well, enough with the basics, it's time to dive into free hosting folks!
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
When it comes to free hosting, there are options such as 000webhost. However, these come with limitations and a whole host of cons that I don't want to get into. Anyway, the better choice that would also give us a great starting point for building a brand that could potentially grow huge is going the Cloud way. AWS and Azure work fine as well, but I've picked GCP because they have this 'Always Free' tier which is perfect for hosting new websites. Also, you get a nice $300 free GCP credits.
GCP Free Tier Limits for Hosting a Website
I actually host all my sites using GCP. I start sites on the free tier and as they start getting more and more visitors (which means hopefully more and more $$$s), I move them to the paid tiers which speed up the site and gets you more storage space.
Note: You will need a valid Credit Card or Debit Card or some valid payment method to start using GCP. However, as long as you only use the free tier instance to host your website, you'll not be billed anything.
With that disclaimer out of the way, here are the steps you need to follow to host your website for free on GCP.
Head over to cloud.google.com, sign in using your Google account and then go to the Console.
You should see a Dashboard. Click on the Navigation Menu and you will see Compute Engine. Hover over that and in the menu that shows up, click on VM Instances.
Let's just ignore the VM part and understand what an Instance is. For all practical purposes, an Instance can be considered as your very own computer that you start up in Google's server farm. Remember that Dell commercial where they make the computer as the customer is speaking on the phone? Here it is, in case you haven't seen it:
Well, this is the future folks and we can do that ourselves without a factory We can decide the RAM, hard disk space, etc. and launch the Instance (create our computer!!).
Once inside VM Instances, click on the Plus button (create Instance). On the next screen that shows up, click on Marketplace in the left pane. In the Search bar, type in 'Wordpress', hit Enter and you'll see a whole bunch of results. Click on the Free option in the left pane to see only free Wordpress Images. Scroll and locate the WordPress image by Google (there are a lot of similar options, so choose carefully).
Then, click on the Launch on Compute Engine button.
In the next screen, you will need to set the configurations of your Instance. Give a name for your instance in the Deployment Name area. In the Zone Dropdown, you can select any US zone, other than US-4 zones. Since the other zones don't come under the Free Tier, we don't use them. In the Machine Type dropdown, select the top-most Micro option (f1-micro). This is the only machine type that you can use for free.
Then, enter the administrator email. This is the email you will use to login to your Wordpress installation. Make sure 'Install PHPMyAdmin' is checked. Make sure the Allow http traffic and Allow https traffic options are checked.
Leave the rest of the settings as they are and click on the Deploy button at the bottom.
Once the Instance has been deployed, select Wordpress and you will get all the necessary details including admin passwords on the right pane. Be sure to back these up in multiple locations.
Your hosting plus Content Management System (Wordpress) is almost ready to use. You just need to promote the Instance's IP address to a static address. To do this, enter 'External IP Addresses' in the Search bar and select the corresponding option. The IP address for the Instance you've just created will show up. In the Type dropdown menu, select Static. In the Window that pops up, give the IP Address a name and click the Reserve button.
This will be the IP address used to access your website. You need to add this as the A Record in your domain's DNS setting. If you've used subdomain.com/com.nu, copy-paste this IP address in the Destination URL field (if you've been following along, it's probably on the other browser tab).
With that, we come to the end of this section. Access the customer-facing side of your website through the Domain URL and the backend Wordpress admin panel through 'Domain URL/wp-admin'.
If you aren't familiar with using Wordpress, you can find all the necessary tutorials here.
Free E-Commerce Platform
If you want to set up an e-commerce store, Woocommerce and Shopify are the two best options. Woocommerce is a free plugin for Wordpress and is the ideal choice for us. Although Shopify isn't free, there are a couple of tricks discovered by fellow BHWers @imustbebored and @H3ktor you can use to set up Shopify and use it for free.
Free Shopify Store
Follow these two guides to go the Shopify route:
1) Creating Shopify Stores using the partner program
2) Accepting Payments in Shopify Development Websites
Note 1: If you're going to use Shopify, you don't have to set up your own hosting.
Note 2: I haven't tested these methods as I usually prefer using Woocommerce. If you're trying them out, do drop in a comment in this thread about your experience.
Free Woocommerce Store
Woocommerce is a free-to-use plugin for Wordpress with an interface that isn't too complex. So I'll just give you guys a brief how-to on using Woocommerce.
After logging into your Wordpress admin panel, hover over the Plugins section in the left pane and click the Add New button. In the Search bar, type in Woocommerce and from the results, install and activate the Woocommerce by Automattic plugin.
Upon activation, the Woocommerce set-up wizard will automatically run. This will take you through the various steps in setting up your store. Just fill in the relevant details, select the appropriate options and keep hitting Next. Do install the recommended Theme - Storefront and Plugins - Woocommerce Admin, Mailchimp, Facebook for Woocommerce. Once done, your Woocommerce store's back-end and customer-facing front-end will be ready to use.
All that's left to do is to create products. To do this, hover over Products on the left pane and click Add New.
Alternately, you can also bulk import a lot of products in one go using Woocommerce's built-in CSV Product Importer. You can access it by clicking on the Import button that shows up at the top when you are in the All Products page. This is my preferred method and I use my own custom python script to automatically fill in the details for 100s of products. Let me know in the comments if you'd be interested in learning to create such scripts and I'll make a new tutorial.
Anyway, back to the New Product creation page. It is pretty simple and you can fill-in as much or as little information as you want about your product. A personal tip would be to always use unique and easy-to-remember Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) codes for all your products. If you don't actually deal with physical products this might seem like overkill, but trust me on this one. These codes will be a life-saver in case you need to bulk-update your listings using the CSV importer. If you don't have SKUs, you will need to use the product IDs to update them. These aren't easy to find nor are they easy to remember.
Once done, all you need to do is hit the Publish button and the product will go live on your store. When customers place orders, it will show up in the Orders section under Woocommerce in the left pane. You can set up region-wise taxes, create discount coupons, offers, and so much more using Woocommerce. Let me know if you'd like and I'll make a detailed post on maybe something like '10 Steps to Taking Your Woocommerce Store from Meh to Whoa!' - yeah, I love coming up with clickbait titles
Free SSL
For those unaware, SSL or Secure Socket Layer is a sort of safety mechanism to prevent phishing and other malicious means to unwittingly extract your private information including credit card details. Why do we, as website owners, need to have SSL for our website? Well, the simple answer is to protect visitors of our website. They have the right to know that the data they give reaches you and only you - not some clever hacker who has learnt to pose like you, or in this case, your website. Let's understand about SSL first before we set it up for our website. I'll explain with an example so that it's easy to grasp the concept. You don't really need to know all this but hey, it could be a nice party conversation to show that geek side yours
What is SSL?
Let me explain with a picture:
I know, I know. You're probably thinking I've shared the wrong image here or that I've gone on a tangent to raise money for my church. Nah, nothing of the sort. Think about this donation box for a moment. Why would anybody put their hard-earned money into a box that is publicly located and trust that it will reach the church administrators?
For starters, it says so on the board. How about that? Bah, anybody could paint a board and put it on a box. Okay, how about the fact that it is located inside the church premises? Oh, and look at that lock - surely, the church authorities wouldn't let any random dude come into THEIR church and put up a box like that in THEIR name. Also, the lock most certainly ensures that the money doesn't get stolen by any random church visitor. Well, there you go, that's the answer to the above question. That's why people put their hard-earned money into the box. Because the authorities have allowed the box to remain in the church which means that they vouch for it and then there's the lock which ensures that the money reaches only the church authorities because THEY ALONE have the key!
Well, replace the church authorities with the Certificate Authority (CA), the painted board with the SSL certificate, the lock and key with the public and private keys and you'll understand how SSL works.
1) There are agencies called Certificate Authorities which are authorized to issue SSL certificates to websites. Would the church allow any random dude to put up a donation box without their permission? Of course, not. Similarly, the CAs diligently verify that you are indeed the owner of the said domain and only when they are satisfied with your proofs will they give you the SSL certificate.
2) This SSL certificate contains what is called a public key. Visitors to the church know that the money that they put in the box cannot be taken by anybody because they see the lock there. The public key printed on your SSL works in a similar way. It tells visitors that a CA has verified your ownership of the domain and then issued you with a lock (public key) and key (private key) to use on the site.
3) Any data that they input on your website will be encrypted and turned into garbage text using the public key. So brilliant random hacker dude who intercepts the data is going to see your credit card number as hERsd79dgn2hdue944n and go what the!! You - the website owner, just like the church authorities, have the private key (YOU ALONE have this ). This private key converts the garbage text into your customer's actual credit card number which you can use to process their payment! Brilliant, isn't it? Even with a free SSL, you can say this to the hackers.
Phew, that went longer than I had anticipated. And you can thank me now for all the dates this knowledge is going to get you
Free Cloudflare SSL
Cloudflare gives an SSL in their free plan and it is pretty easy to set-up. I personally prefer using Let's Encrypt because there is a theory (conspiracy or not, I'll let you decide for yourself) that using Cloudflare affects your SEO. Although a bit complicated, I just want to stay in the safe zone when it comes to SEO and so always go for Let's Encrypt's free SSL.
Anyway, I'm kind of feeling a bit lazy after explaining about SSL in detail so I looked up if anyone in BHW has already explained the steps and found this post. It does link to an external site but I went through the steps and they seem fine. Just a small mistake that the OP has pointed out in the thread.
Free Let's Encrypt SSL
Let's Encrypt is a non-profit organization who are on a mission to rid the internet of all phishing, hacking, etc. They are like Batman, silently fighting evil without getting the due recognition that they deserve.
Anyway, lazy me (you've gotta cut me some slack man, I've already typed over 3000 words) found the perfect step by step explanation to installing a Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate for your domain (Wordpress website hosted on a Google Cloud Instance). Here's the link. I've gone through the steps and followed it exactly to get my site to start showing the lock and the all-important 'https' in the URL.
Free Custom Domain Business Email
Whether you're building a personal portfolio website or a brand, a business email id ([email protected]) just ups your reputation by several points. When I see e-commerce stores or other sellers in facebook listing gmail/yahoo ids, there's this little part of me that's already judging them for being cheap / not professional (trust me it's not intentional, but you have to know that it happens in my mind and I'm pretty sure in the minds of millions of others too!). Self-reminder to change my email ids in a lot of places from gmail to something more professional
Thankfully for us, we have free options for creating those shiny business email ids. Let's dive in and create those.
Free Zoho Business Email
Zoho's an Indian company that's been in the SAAS space for quite some time now. I've been a loyal customer for around two years and am really impressed by the sheer number of awesome features that they offer in their free plans. Their paid plans aren't too expensive either and the quality is superb.
When it comes to mail, they currently give 5 custom business email ids in their free plan. It is sad that this number has been steadily reducing over the years though. Two years ago, they were offering 25 free ids, then it became 10 and now it's come down to 5 Anyway, 5 is still a great starting point for a new brand. So let's dive into the steps, shall we?
Head to the Zoho mail pricing page. Once it loads, scroll down and you'll see the Forever Free Plan box. Click on the Sign Up Now button.
In the next screen, enter your domain name and click the Add button. In the following screen, just fill up the usual details - name, mobile number, email, password, and country. You will also have to enter the admin email id - this is the email that will have admin access, meaning that is the id using which you can create the remaining 4 email ids. This admin will also be able to change their passwords, log them out, and do all sorts of things. So this better be yours If you have colleagues, you can set up emails for them or use the other 4 slots for email ids like no-reply@[domain.com], support@[domain.com], etc. These will always come in handy.
Once done, you'll be asked to verify your mobile number using an SMS. Do it. Now, the easy part is complete. The next few steps will be slightly complicated, but nothing you can't do by simply following the step by step instructions.
The first thing that you need to do is verify your ownership of that domain. You can do this through several ways, but I'd recommend the CNAME or the TXT methods, since they are pretty straightforward. Thankfully for us, Zoho have prepared a super detailed step-by-step how-to. They've even included the steps to do this for various hosting providers. All you need to do is simply follow the CNAME method's steps to verify your ownership of the domain.
Post this, there're a few more steps that you need to follow to complete configuration of your business email. These have been explained in detail in this guide by Zoho. Just jump to Setting up Zoho Mail and follow the steps and screenshots.
BONUS: Free Plugins and Tools to Up Your SEO Game
When it comes to driving traffic to your website, nothing can beat SEO. It's a work hard, rank site, reap rewards for a long long time kind of mechanism that is so awesome. But hey, let me not digress and venture too deep into SEO. What I'm going to talk about in this section will help you along in your SEO journey. Like everything in this post, these tools and plugins are, of course, completely FREE!
Everyone thinks of articles, keyword optimization, etc. when it comes to SEO. However, one aspect that is often forgotten is Image SEO. Its potential is tremendous. So, how do you get your images to start showing up in the search results for relevant terms? Simple, you put in the right image name, image alt attribute, image description, and image title. You do that for all your images diligently and voila, soon you'll start seeing significant traffic coming in from Google images.
Auto Image Attributes From Filename With Bulk Updater
The problem with this scheme is that it's incredibly hard to come up with content for these attributes of each image. The solution? Use the Auto Image Attributes From Filename plugin (for Wordpress). With this plugin, all you have to do is give proper descriptive names such as 'image-of-a-young-boy-holding-an-orchid-flower.jpg'. This plugin will automatically convert this file name into readable text and assign it to the image's other attributes so that Google can easily recognize what that image is.
WebP Express
Almost 60%, Nah I think the actual percentage might be well over that, of the internet traffic is through mobile devices. People usually use 3g or a 4g connection to browse using mobile devices and the speeds for these connections aren't that great - which means - your website will have to be lightweight in order to load quickly. Images are the bulkiest parts of any website.
Google identified this problem about ten years back and came up with the WebP image format. This format retains almost 90% of the original image's quality but has file sizes that are one third or even less when compared to traditional image formats such as jpg and png. So all you have to do to make your website load really fast would be to convert your images to webp. Faster websites also rank better in Google search results! Ah, so simple, isn't it?
The catch? Ah, there had to be one Not all internet browsers support this webp format.
The Solution? WebP express. This plugin automatically converts your images to webp and keeps two copies of each image - one in regular jpg/png and the other in webp. It detects if the visitor's browser supports webp and if it does, it serves webp images that are super small in size. If the browser doesn't, it serves the regular jpg/png images.
Well folks, this post has become a bit too long and I’ll wrap it up for now. I do have a lot more info that I wanted to share including free social media management tools, free newsletter services, etc. There’s always going to be another day and another post, so I’ll leave them be for now. Until next time, so long folks
Cheers!
Armur
Well, fast forward 10 years and I now run a few online businesses and pay each month for a bunch of SAAS, I use legit copies of image editing software (2010 me would so look at me and sulk that I've gone over to the Dark Side), I pay for hosting, and a whole bunch of things. Hell, I even pay an accountant to work part-time to handle all these payments and take care of bookkeeping.
Anyway, I still do like to go the free-route whenever possible. After all, there are numerous free and open source solutions that do a great job. I've been setting up a few test sites these last few weeks and discovered that you could, in fact, go from A to Z when starting a new website using such free services. Another big surprise to me was that these services are actually good and reliable - now that's something 2010 teenage me with no money would be proud of having discovered.
I'll put in a small Table of Contents here, so if you just need a free solution for one particular aspect of opening a website, you can jump straight there.
Table of Contents
- Free Domain Registration
- Subdomain.com / Com.nu
- Freenom
- Free Hosting + Content Management System
- Google Cloud Platform Free Tier + Wordpress
- Free E-Commerce Platform
- Free Shopify Store
- Free Woocommerce Store
- Free SSL
- What is SSL?
- Free Cloudflare SSL
- Free Let's Encrypt SSL
- Free Custom Domain Business Email
- Free Zoho Business Email
- BONUS: Free Plugins and Tools to Up Your SEO Game
Whoa! Looks like this is going to be one looong post. Before I get started, I definitely have to thank @Sherb and @LukaB for their posts on building websites and brands. Those helped me build my first couple of sites and I'm forever grateful. Plus, there's a ton of useful tidbits in those posts that are definitely invaluable. You can find LukaB's post here and Sherb's post on building a brand here.
So let's get started, folks!
Free Domain Registration
Domain is just a fancy name for a website address. .COM / .NET / .ORG domains are the preferred ones and usually cost anywhere upwards of $5 per year. If you're planning to start a web store for long term projects or if it's a website to showcase your portfolio, I'd highly recommend that you spend a little and get the .COMs and .NETs.
I was super impressed by @Matt707 recent thread on selling MAGA hats and wanted to try something similar. So I'll take up that project and set up a complete website for free now. I'll take screenshots, post them here, and explain the process as and when I do it so that it's easy for you guys to replicate. When it comes to free domain registration, there are two good options available. Let's take a look at how to set up domains in both these options.
Psst. : My recommendation would be to use subdomain.com
Subdomain.com / Com.nu
Subdomain.com and com.nu don't actually offer you free domains but they rather offer you free subdomains on their super short domains including com.nu. So you will get addresses like 'domain.com.nu' which doesn't look too bad if you ask me. However, like everything that's free, there's a small catch - you'll only be able to redirect the subdomain. This means that your URLs will look neat and clean when you share them on Social Media and other forums but when customers actually reach your site, they will see only your hosting's IP address. For short term projects, this shouldn't be too big an issue - most visitors will probably think that you've made some configuration error and so the IP address is showing up.
Note: With this method of redirecting without actually using a proper domain, you will not be able to set up SSL (usually recommended -> read on to find out why) or a custom domain email id (eg. [email protected]). So I'll reiterate this again, if you're building a brand, just bite your lips, spend the $5 and get a domain for yourself.
So for this project, since we will be selling hats, let me look up catchy words related to it and see if they're available.
Enter the word of your choice, select the domain, and click on the Check button. If it's available, sign up for an account and login using the email and password that you receive by email. On the next screen, click on 'Create Redirect'.
On the next page, just give your project a name and select a category. Hit Next.
On the next screen, we will need to enter the redirect URL. We'll need to pause here (just keep the page in a separate tab) and set up the free hosting for our website.
Once we finish setting up the hosting, we will switch to this page and enter the IP address of our host here in the Destination URL.
Freenom
Freenom.com is a company that offers free domains on various (less popular, of course) extensions such as .TK, .ML, .GA, .CF, and .GQ. However, you should know that they aren't domain registrars who register the domain in your name. Rather, they have the domain registered in their name and simply give you free access for a year. Also, their primary source of income is by simply taking back the domains that are generating good traffic and replacing the sites on these domains with pages filled with ads. So don't be surprised if, one fine morning, you find your website replaced by a wall of ads.
That being said, these domains work just fine for short term projects (less than 6 months) since you aren't going to be using SEO for traffic. Oh, and before I forget Search Engines usually don't index these domains as well.
To get started, let me look up catchy words related to hats and see if anything's available.
Well, what do you know! First time lucky and all domains are available for registration right now. Let me go ahead and pick one. Or maaaybe, I'll just go ahead and register all five
Shrewd guy eliminating potential copycat competition - pat on the back for myself.Once you select the domain(s), hit the checkout button. On the next screen, change the duration to 12 months free and hit Continue.
You'll be taken to the Review and Checkout page. Scroll down and Login if you're already registered with Freenom or enter your email address and hit Verify My Email Address.
You'll get an email with the verification link. Click that and it will take you to the Checkout Page where you need to enter your details. Enter the details, check the 'Accept Terms' checkbox and click the Complete Order button.
You'll get the order confirmation message and your domain should be registered. You'll still need to add 'A Records' to point the domain to your hosting's IP address. Let's get into that after we've finished setting up our website's hosting.
Free Hosting + Content Management System
Before we dive into the depths of setting up free hosting, let's first understand how websites actually work. A website is nothing but a collection of pages that exist in a computer somewhere in the World. That's right, on a computer! This computer runs 24x7 and is always connected to the Internet and has what is called a server software (usually apache or ngnix) installed on it. This server software simply gives visiting browsers the pages that they request for viewing. Thus they enable visitors to view the pages stored in that computer. Simple as that
It is very much possible to set up this server software on a spare computer, connect it to the internet and keep it running 24x7, but why bother when there are companies (web host providers) who do it for you. Plus, since they do it at a large scale, their prices are cheaper(or in our case - free!) as well.
Cloud Computing (Amazon's AWS, Google Cloud Platform or GCP, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, etc. ) are all exactly the same thing as well. These companies just have computers running in their server farms that you can rent and use for your projects. As surprising as it may sound...
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
When it comes to free hosting, there are options such as 000webhost. However, these come with limitations and a whole host of cons that I don't want to get into. Anyway, the better choice that would also give us a great starting point for building a brand that could potentially grow huge is going the Cloud way. AWS and Azure work fine as well, but I've picked GCP because they have this 'Always Free' tier which is perfect for hosting new websites. Also, you get a nice $300 free GCP credits.
GCP Free Tier Limits for Hosting a Website
I actually host all my sites using GCP. I start sites on the free tier and as they start getting more and more visitors (which means hopefully more and more $$$s), I move them to the paid tiers which speed up the site and gets you more storage space.
Note: You will need a valid Credit Card or Debit Card or some valid payment method to start using GCP. However, as long as you only use the free tier instance to host your website, you'll not be billed anything.
With that disclaimer out of the way, here are the steps you need to follow to host your website for free on GCP.
Head over to cloud.google.com, sign in using your Google account and then go to the Console.
You should see a Dashboard. Click on the Navigation Menu and you will see Compute Engine. Hover over that and in the menu that shows up, click on VM Instances.
Let's just ignore the VM part and understand what an Instance is. For all practical purposes, an Instance can be considered as your very own computer that you start up in Google's server farm. Remember that Dell commercial where they make the computer as the customer is speaking on the phone? Here it is, in case you haven't seen it:
Well, this is the future folks and we can do that ourselves without a factory
We can decide the RAM, hard disk space, etc. and launch the Instance (create our computer!!).Once inside VM Instances, click on the Plus button (create Instance). On the next screen that shows up, click on Marketplace in the left pane. In the Search bar, type in 'Wordpress', hit Enter and you'll see a whole bunch of results. Click on the Free option in the left pane to see only free Wordpress Images. Scroll and locate the WordPress image by Google (there are a lot of similar options, so choose carefully).
Then, click on the Launch on Compute Engine button.
In the next screen, you will need to set the configurations of your Instance. Give a name for your instance in the Deployment Name area. In the Zone Dropdown, you can select any US zone, other than US-4 zones. Since the other zones don't come under the Free Tier, we don't use them. In the Machine Type dropdown, select the top-most Micro option (f1-micro). This is the only machine type that you can use for free.
Then, enter the administrator email. This is the email you will use to login to your Wordpress installation. Make sure 'Install PHPMyAdmin' is checked. Make sure the Allow http traffic and Allow https traffic options are checked.
Leave the rest of the settings as they are and click on the Deploy button at the bottom.
Once the Instance has been deployed, select Wordpress and you will get all the necessary details including admin passwords on the right pane. Be sure to back these up in multiple locations.
Your hosting plus Content Management System (Wordpress) is almost ready to use. You just need to promote the Instance's IP address to a static address. To do this, enter 'External IP Addresses' in the Search bar and select the corresponding option. The IP address for the Instance you've just created will show up. In the Type dropdown menu, select Static. In the Window that pops up, give the IP Address a name and click the Reserve button.
This will be the IP address used to access your website. You need to add this as the A Record in your domain's DNS setting. If you've used subdomain.com/com.nu, copy-paste this IP address in the Destination URL field (if you've been following along, it's probably on the other browser tab).
With that, we come to the end of this section. Access the customer-facing side of your website through the Domain URL and the backend Wordpress admin panel through 'Domain URL/wp-admin'.
If you aren't familiar with using Wordpress, you can find all the necessary tutorials here.
Free E-Commerce Platform
If you want to set up an e-commerce store, Woocommerce and Shopify are the two best options. Woocommerce is a free plugin for Wordpress and is the ideal choice for us. Although Shopify isn't free, there are a couple of tricks discovered by fellow BHWers @imustbebored and @H3ktor you can use to set up Shopify and use it for free.
Free Shopify Store
Follow these two guides to go the Shopify route:
1) Creating Shopify Stores using the partner program
2) Accepting Payments in Shopify Development Websites
Note 1: If you're going to use Shopify, you don't have to set up your own hosting.
Note 2: I haven't tested these methods as I usually prefer using Woocommerce. If you're trying them out, do drop in a comment in this thread about your experience.
Free Woocommerce Store
Woocommerce is a free-to-use plugin for Wordpress with an interface that isn't too complex. So I'll just give you guys a brief how-to on using Woocommerce.
After logging into your Wordpress admin panel, hover over the Plugins section in the left pane and click the Add New button. In the Search bar, type in Woocommerce and from the results, install and activate the Woocommerce by Automattic plugin.
Upon activation, the Woocommerce set-up wizard will automatically run. This will take you through the various steps in setting up your store. Just fill in the relevant details, select the appropriate options and keep hitting Next. Do install the recommended Theme - Storefront and Plugins - Woocommerce Admin, Mailchimp, Facebook for Woocommerce. Once done, your Woocommerce store's back-end and customer-facing front-end will be ready to use.
All that's left to do is to create products. To do this, hover over Products on the left pane and click Add New.
Alternately, you can also bulk import a lot of products in one go using Woocommerce's built-in CSV Product Importer. You can access it by clicking on the Import button that shows up at the top when you are in the All Products page. This is my preferred method and I use my own custom python script to automatically fill in the details for 100s of products. Let me know in the comments if you'd be interested in learning to create such scripts and I'll make a new tutorial.
Anyway, back to the New Product creation page. It is pretty simple and you can fill-in as much or as little information as you want about your product. A personal tip would be to always use unique and easy-to-remember Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) codes for all your products. If you don't actually deal with physical products this might seem like overkill, but trust me on this one. These codes will be a life-saver in case you need to bulk-update your listings using the CSV importer. If you don't have SKUs, you will need to use the product IDs to update them. These aren't easy to find nor are they easy to remember.
Once done, all you need to do is hit the Publish button and the product will go live on your store. When customers place orders, it will show up in the Orders section under Woocommerce in the left pane. You can set up region-wise taxes, create discount coupons, offers, and so much more using Woocommerce. Let me know if you'd like and I'll make a detailed post on maybe something like '10 Steps to Taking Your Woocommerce Store from Meh to Whoa!' - yeah, I love coming up with clickbait titles
Free SSL
For those unaware, SSL or Secure Socket Layer is a sort of safety mechanism to prevent phishing and other malicious means to unwittingly extract your private information including credit card details. Why do we, as website owners, need to have SSL for our website? Well, the simple answer is to protect visitors of our website. They have the right to know that the data they give reaches you and only you - not some clever hacker who has learnt to pose like you, or in this case, your website. Let's understand about SSL first before we set it up for our website. I'll explain with an example so that it's easy to grasp the concept. You don't really need to know all this but hey, it could be a nice party conversation to show that geek side yours
What is SSL?
Let me explain with a picture:
For starters, it says so on the board. How about that? Bah, anybody could paint a board and put it on a box. Okay, how about the fact that it is located inside the church premises? Oh, and look at that lock - surely, the church authorities wouldn't let any random dude come into THEIR church and put up a box like that in THEIR name. Also, the lock most certainly ensures that the money doesn't get stolen by any random church visitor. Well, there you go, that's the answer to the above question. That's why people put their hard-earned money into the box. Because the authorities have allowed the box to remain in the church which means that they vouch for it and then there's the lock which ensures that the money reaches only the church authorities because THEY ALONE have the key!
Well, replace the church authorities with the Certificate Authority (CA), the painted board with the SSL certificate, the lock and key with the public and private keys and you'll understand how SSL works.
1) There are agencies called Certificate Authorities which are authorized to issue SSL certificates to websites. Would the church allow any random dude to put up a donation box without their permission? Of course, not. Similarly, the CAs diligently verify that you are indeed the owner of the said domain and only when they are satisfied with your proofs will they give you the SSL certificate.
2) This SSL certificate contains what is called a public key. Visitors to the church know that the money that they put in the box cannot be taken by anybody because they see the lock there. The public key printed on your SSL works in a similar way. It tells visitors that a CA has verified your ownership of the domain and then issued you with a lock (public key) and key (private key) to use on the site.
3) Any data that they input on your website will be encrypted and turned into garbage text using the public key. So brilliant random hacker dude who intercepts the data is going to see your credit card number as hERsd79dgn2hdue944n and go what the
!! You - the website owner, just like the church authorities, have the private key (YOU ALONE have this ). This private key converts the garbage text into your customer's actual credit card number which you can use to process their payment! Brilliant, isn't it? Even with a free SSL, you can say this to the hackers.
Free Cloudflare SSL
Cloudflare gives an SSL in their free plan and it is pretty easy to set-up. I personally prefer using Let's Encrypt because there is a theory (conspiracy or not, I'll let you decide for yourself) that using Cloudflare affects your SEO. Although a bit complicated, I just want to stay in the safe zone when it comes to SEO and so always go for Let's Encrypt's free SSL.
Anyway, I'm kind of feeling a bit lazy after explaining about SSL in detail so I looked up if anyone in BHW has already explained the steps and found this post. It does link to an external site but I went through the steps and they seem fine. Just a small mistake that the OP has pointed out in the thread.
Free Let's Encrypt SSL
Let's Encrypt is a non-profit organization who are on a mission to rid the internet of all phishing, hacking, etc. They are like Batman, silently fighting evil without getting the due recognition that they deserve.
Anyway, lazy me (you've gotta cut me some slack man, I've already typed over 3000 words
) found the perfect step by step explanation to installing a Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate for your domain (Wordpress website hosted on a Google Cloud Instance). Here's the link. I've gone through the steps and followed it exactly to get my site to start showing the lock and the all-important 'https' in the URL.Free Custom Domain Business Email
Whether you're building a personal portfolio website or a brand, a business email id ([email protected]) just ups your reputation by several points. When I see e-commerce stores or other sellers in facebook listing gmail/yahoo ids, there's this little part of me that's already judging them for being cheap / not professional (trust me it's not intentional, but you have to know that it happens in my mind and I'm pretty sure in the minds of millions of others too!). Self-reminder to change my email ids in a lot of places from gmail to something more professional
Thankfully for us, we have free options for creating those shiny business email ids. Let's dive in and create those.
Free Zoho Business Email
Zoho's an Indian company that's been in the SAAS space for quite some time now. I've been a loyal customer for around two years and am really impressed by the sheer number of awesome features that they offer in their free plans. Their paid plans aren't too expensive either and the quality is superb.
When it comes to mail, they currently give 5 custom business email ids in their free plan. It is sad that this number has been steadily reducing over the years though. Two years ago, they were offering 25 free ids, then it became 10 and now it's come down to 5
Anyway, 5 is still a great starting point for a new brand. So let's dive into the steps, shall we?Head to the Zoho mail pricing page. Once it loads, scroll down and you'll see the Forever Free Plan box. Click on the Sign Up Now button.
If you have colleagues, you can set up emails for them or use the other 4 slots for email ids like no-reply@[domain.com], support@[domain.com], etc. These will always come in handy.Once done, you'll be asked to verify your mobile number using an SMS. Do it. Now, the easy part is complete. The next few steps will be slightly complicated, but nothing you can't do by simply following the step by step instructions.
The first thing that you need to do is verify your ownership of that domain. You can do this through several ways, but I'd recommend the CNAME or the TXT methods, since they are pretty straightforward. Thankfully for us, Zoho have prepared a super detailed step-by-step how-to. They've even included the steps to do this for various hosting providers. All you need to do is simply follow the CNAME method's steps to verify your ownership of the domain.
Post this, there're a few more steps that you need to follow to complete configuration of your business email. These have been explained in detail in this guide by Zoho. Just jump to Setting up Zoho Mail and follow the steps and screenshots.
BONUS: Free Plugins and Tools to Up Your SEO Game
When it comes to driving traffic to your website, nothing can beat SEO. It's a work hard, rank site, reap rewards for a long long time kind of mechanism that is so awesome. But hey, let me not digress and venture too deep into SEO. What I'm going to talk about in this section will help you along in your SEO journey. Like everything in this post, these tools and plugins are, of course, completely FREE!
Everyone thinks of articles, keyword optimization, etc. when it comes to SEO. However, one aspect that is often forgotten is Image SEO. Its potential is tremendous. So, how do you get your images to start showing up in the search results for relevant terms? Simple, you put in the right image name, image alt attribute, image description, and image title. You do that for all your images diligently and voila, soon you'll start seeing significant traffic coming in from Google images.
Auto Image Attributes From Filename With Bulk Updater
The problem with this scheme is that it's incredibly hard to come up with content for these attributes of each image. The solution? Use the Auto Image Attributes From Filename plugin (for Wordpress). With this plugin, all you have to do is give proper descriptive names such as 'image-of-a-young-boy-holding-an-orchid-flower.jpg'. This plugin will automatically convert this file name into readable text and assign it to the image's other attributes so that Google can easily recognize what that image is.
WebP Express
Almost 60%, Nah I think the actual percentage might be well over that, of the internet traffic is through mobile devices. People usually use 3g or a 4g connection to browse using mobile devices and the speeds for these connections aren't that great - which means - your website will have to be lightweight in order to load quickly. Images are the bulkiest parts of any website.
Google identified this problem about ten years back and came up with the WebP image format. This format retains almost 90% of the original image's quality but has file sizes that are one third or even less when compared to traditional image formats such as jpg and png. So all you have to do to make your website load really fast would be to convert your images to webp. Faster websites also rank better in Google search results! Ah, so simple, isn't it?
The catch? Ah, there had to be one
Not all internet browsers support this webp format.The Solution? WebP express. This plugin automatically converts your images to webp and keeps two copies of each image - one in regular jpg/png and the other in webp. It detects if the visitor's browser supports webp and if it does, it serves webp images that are super small in size. If the browser doesn't, it serves the regular jpg/png images.
Well folks, this post has become a bit too long and I’ll wrap it up for now. I do have a lot more info that I wanted to share including free social media management tools, free newsletter services, etc. There’s always going to be another day and another post, so I’ll leave them be for now. Until next time, so long folks
Cheers!
Armur
