Before we even get to installing any of our software, we need somewhere for it to live:
- A domain name so that people know what it’s called
- A nameserver so that it can be found
- Hosting – a server to install the software on
Domain Name
The one thing every website needs is a domain name.
Yes, some platforms allow sites to be located on a subdomain of their free hosting, but you really don’t want to go anywhere near that option – when we look at some of the other choices ahead, we are going to be considering “ownership”. Who owns your website and data? If you don’t even own your domain name, you’ll never be able to move.
Lots of platforms also offer a domain name free for the first year, or outfits like GoDaddy will offer you a .uk for only 1p – except you have to pay for 3 years in advance and their charges for years 2 and 3 more than make up for the special offer. Sneaky.
We get domains at a bargain price through one of our reseller accounts, but if you don’t have access to those kind of offers, we recommend Namecheap. As the name suggests, they are very reasonably priced, but with the added benefit of being reliable and having great support. Plus, they don’t charge to move away – a disappointingly frequent occurrence with some registrars.
Registering your domain with Cloudflare, which we are about to discuss, can be even cheaper. But for the time being, I’m keeping my eggs in different baskets. And, for most people, Namecheap is easier to cope with.
For a .uk domain, you don’t want to be paying more than £10+VAT per year.
Nameservers
A nameserver is like a telephone directory for the internet. If you’re old enough to know what one of those is.
It takes the name you type in – like “buildyour.community” – and turns it into a number, or IP address, of the server you need to talk to.
Most people will just use the nameservers of their registrar, but here we’re using Cloudflare. This gives us a few benefits:
- WAF – a “Web Application Firewall” – powerful tools to protect our site before those pesky intruders even get near our server.
- CDN – the “Content Delivery Network” – a set of servers around the world that deliver your website data to your visitors as close to their location as possible. Not only does it make the site faster, it also reduces the load on our server.
- Easy management – not so important in this case, but we can use Cloudflare to give other people access to your domain name settings. For example, giving your IT support company the access they need to keep your email running smoothly, without having to share passwords or give them access to things they don’t need.
We’re using some firewall rules based on Troy Glancy’s well-respected list but all of this still keeps us in Cloudflare’s free tier.
I’ll also be taking advantage of some of Cloudflare’s free storage allowance, so I’m setting this site up in an account of its own.
Hosting
We use different hosting providers depending on the type of website being hosted. But in this case, “shared” hosting – the kind you get with Ionos or GoDaddy – just won’t cut it. Online communities need more resources because of the number of people logged in and doing things at the same time.
We’re going for a VPS – Virtual Private Server. It’s virtual because it is neither truly private nor a single server. Instead, we are allocated our own private chunk of resources on a real server.
Our favourite host, at the moment, is Hetzner. Although they are based in Germany (we know for sure they will be GDPR compliant!) we still find their servers faster than a similar spec up the road in London. Besides, with that Cloudflare CDN, we’re not really bothered where they are. They offer an amazing balance of performance vs cost.
They also use 100% green energy (there’s a hydro-electric dam just around the corner from our server) and integrate seamlessly with our control panel of choice…
We use RunCloud to manage our servers, taking away the stress of keeping everything at the server level up-to-date and secure, plus making it much easier to deploy and manage sites.
About £25 per month would cover the hosting costs for most online community needs – based on the tools we are going to be using later.
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