So a good friend of mine gave me this little advice: Get a 1-year free domain via Github Students (if you’re a student). This was the incentive to search for an appropriate hosting service for my website, of course: free.
My journey let me into the deep jungle the internet is. The first approach to accomplish this endeavour was to lookup my very first hoster bplaced.net. I signed up for the free plan because beplaced seems trustworthy.
I uploaded the website and got it all working; so I decided to use the wild card which I had from the Github Student pack which was a ‘free’ .digital (or .bike, .wtf, etc.) Domain! The choice quickly fell on gluecksmaschine; unreserved and flexible. After a fairly simple setup I pointed my DNS records at my site.
You may already recognised that some of the posts are very old. And I update them from time to time. The posts fill this beautiful theme. But I wasn’t convinced yet and wanted to figure out all technical details before I could start writing again.
Mmh.. I love Dark-modes.
The best choice for your tired eyes at night
Bplaced disabled SSL and plugin auto installation. With no way of circumventing this roadblock I moved on and searched for a better hoster. (Secretly I hated my old domain ‘name’, so I also wanted an appropriate hosting service for my new one gluecksmaschine.digital).
And so I tried several free hosters including Googiehost. It is a Company from India wich offered free cpanel hosting in the past. After some days I received my Welcome-Email and DirectAdmin access. Unfortunately the site was full of bugs. It was a nightmare. But you get what you pay for. Even after I changed my nameservers, what took 1 1/2 weeks, I wasn’t able to connect via FTP.
So I left again, but learned a lot. Finally I signed up for Google Cloud free trial. This includes a year of playing and messing about with the features, you have 300 $ to spend. I was happy that there was more or less a one-click- install for WordPress on their smallest Virtual Machine.
Conclusion
This is a one year experiment. In essence to learn a bit and maybe write & create some content online. I know that the tld .digital will fade after a year (unless you spend some fair amount of money) and is useless for meaningful SEO. For sure I will keep backups of the posts & content. Maybe they’ll see the light of the open internet again in the far future?