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How to purchase your own domain name and set up a web server from $5 a month

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This guide will show technically minded people how you can purchase your own domain name, set up a web server on Vultr with an online store using WordPress/WooCommerce from $5 a month. Warning this post is technical (if you have never used SSH, Ubuntu, Linux Command Line, hate risk or are not patient then this is NOT the guide you are after).

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Draft Post (released early to share)

I personally recommend (not a paid endorsement) the free WooCommerce plugin for the free WordPress.org CMS on the free Ubuntu Operating system with the free NGINX web server and the free MYSQL database engine and free SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Sorry for using the word free a lot but I like free things.  One of the benefits of a using a self-managed server is you get the option to install free software and configure the server how you want and secure it how you want. Truth be told managed ho (e.g CPanel, etc) are in the business of making money via monthly feed, expensive SSL certificates, taxing your transactions or pushing you to higher priced tiers.

Legend:

  • Self Managed Server = A server that you create, you configure patch and support (all the reward and risk is owned by you and costs are low).
  • Hosted Server = A server you have partial control of and the hosts manage the server and support (You hand away all risk and most of the control and pay for support/features).

I moved to a self-managed server after I was paying $25/m for a poorly performing website and $150/y for a poor quality  SSL certificate and a slice of a server that seemed to always say “Usage Limit Exceeded”. Why pay for an insecure website that my visitors could not view because the usage limit was exceeded.

Bad CPanel SSL Certificate

fyi: Fearby.com costs me $10 a month for a server and $5/m for CDN abilities.

CPanel hosts are an option when you don’t want to self-manage a service and take on the hassle but be prepared for server limitations (The image below was taken on an older CPanel based hosts before I moved to a self-managed Vultr server)

cpenal_usage_exceeded

I recently discovered a well known and established website hosting service (that I used to use) and a friend is still using is insecure. My friend’s site has a static website on it but the server underneath was very old and insecure. Having a secure web server should be at the top of your list with any self-managed or hosted website (this will help search engine optimization and prevent risks to your website visitors).

Static Website

Sites like Virus Total, SSL Labs and Alexa Site Info , Qualys are good ways to review a site’s credibility.

fyi: The awesome https://seositecheckup.com/ is awesome for evaluating our sites SEO score.

Before we set up a server with WordPress on your own server let’s quickly look at the alternative commercial ready to go website builders.

 

Alternative (paid) DIY Website Builders

The following leading commercial sites will allow you to build a site online.

In my opinion, five things matter with setting up site online website.

  • Setup Costs, Monthly Cost and Commissions (what are the hidden charges)
  • Security (having a food SSL Certificate is key to having a good organic traffic from search engines)
  • Site Speed (Having a slow site will impact search engine optimization and drive visitors away)
  • Accessibility (if your site is not WCAG accessible it will not rank high on search engines).
  • Control (will you be able to do everything you want too, nothing worse than going so far and being limited)

Ok, let’s see how much it will cost to set up a simple business site on the sites above.

 

Wix 

Setup: Goto https://www.wix.com/, Login to Wix, click Create Site, click Business, Click Choose a Template, Edit the page, Click Save, Click “Connect your own customized domain“, Click “Connect a domain you already own“.

I was redirected to a Wix plan pricing page where I need to choose a plan to continue. From what I researched you cant control HTML on Wix so can’t add a MailChimp newsletter signup form so you would have to go with the $24.5/m option to enable Email Campaigns.

Wix Plans Chooser

I could not see information about included SSL certificates, SEO or other chargers.  SSL is free after you pay right?

The Wix editor appears OK (it may take a bit of learning though).

Wix Editoer

I clicked publish and the site was live

Wix site published

A quick check of the SSL, Accessibility and SEO and no obvious deal breakers here apart from the price and platform lock-in.

Wix Checkup

I performed a security check on the site with https://freescan.qualys.com (passed)

Conclusion: I hear Wix templates are hard to change so choose your template wisely, A large collection of apps are available that you can add to the site.

Although Wix was nice and it does include a full-featured look at the engine it is not for me ($24/m USD is too expensive).

 

Squarespace 

Squarespace basic websites cost $16/$25 a month or $34/52 for online stores: https://www.squarespace.com/pricing/

SquareSpace Pricing

Setup a Squarespace website: Goto https://www.squarespace.com/, Click Start a Free Trial, Choose a Template, Create an Account (a quick read of the terms of service and privacy policy, #scary), SpareSpace sites are pre-published?

Square Space Build

Loading the webpage on a non-logged-in (with SquareSpace login) browser displays a trial warning.  Trial pages are essentially restricted (unlike Wix).

Login Challenge

The mobile view does not match the template?  I guess the chosen template is more of a vibe and not a template.

Mobile view

Setting up a Squarespace website may take some time. Squarespace does have some nifty advance options in a slide-out menu though.

Squarespace Settings

Because the public view of the page is restricted I cannot scan it with WCAG accessibility tools. Scanning the site performance speeds with gtmetrix also fails.

Performance Rejected

Squarespace is well known to be difficult to set up a website when compared to other drag and drop editors (but Squarespace sites do look nice).

I am not paying $54/m for a website so let’s move on.

 

Shopify

Shopify Setup: Goto https://shopify.com and click Create, Sign up and enter your store name. Complete the wizard. 

Shopify

Choose a Shopify Plan

Shopify Plan

Scalping transactions, no thanks. let’s move on.

 

Weebly

Weebly Setup: Goto https://www.weebly.com/au and click Get Started under Create Store. Enter your account details and click Create Your Site, enter the name of the store, Click I’m just trying Weebly, click the type of product you will be selling.

Weebly Site Setup

Weebly Setup

Theme Selection

Theme Select

Choose a Domain

Domain Select

Publish the site

Publish

Clicking publish appears to be a dead end.

Verify Weebly

“Please contact Weebly Support to verify your account”, No Thanks, let’s move on.

One candidate remains and that is WordPress hosted (wordpress.com not wordpress.org).

 

WordPress.com

WordPress.com offer hosted plans for WordPress in the cloud.

Setup a WordPress site, the only one that removes WordPress branding and allows third-party plugins to be installed it the Business plans for $33 a month.

WordPress Plans

Setup Basics

Wordpress

Choose a WordPress theme.

Choose Theme

Assign a Domain

WordPress Domain

In order to buy a domain, you need to log in (top right) with an account

My working WordPress account (is no longer working), it was in my password manager.

wordpresscomerror

I seem to be stuck in a signup loop

Wordpress

Time to move on. Time to set up my own server on Vultr and setup WordPress and  WooCommerce,

But, before we do, let’s ensure our name is secure online.

Search for your Name/Brand

Do search for your website (or thing) in search engines to see if your name is already taken, don’t buy a domain that is owned or has IP or trademark presence. It is a  good idea to use sites like https://namechk.com/ to see if your site or social media is already taken.

https://namechk.com/

namechk.com will allow you to search for name availability online.  The name “mything” is not fully available online.

https://namechk.com/ 2

You will want to see all green squares (name available) below before buying a domain name. This looks better.

Namechk ok

I would recommend you create your social media accounts before or right after buying your domain. Sites like Twitter will insist on short usernames names so get your social media sites first.

 

Trademark and Brand Search

Also, perform a trademark and IP search.

Australian Trademark Search: https://search.ipaustralia.gov.au/trademarks/search/quick

United States Trademark Database: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database

Global brand Search: http://www.wipo.int/branddb/en/

etc

 

 

Self Managed Warning

I tend to go the “self-managed server route” and install the free WordPress CMS because:

There are many reasons why you would not want to “self-manage” your own server

  • Technical Requirements (and time to support).
  • Higher Risk.
  • Applying Updates and Patches.
  • etc.

Being technically minded and choosing a “self-managed web servers” can take away time from the fun stuff like SEO, Site Design, customer needs, branding etc. If you do not have experience with SEO, designing, branding, social media, websites etc (and need help) please talk to my friends at Niche Creative (this is not a not a paid endorsement, they are passionate and know thier stuff). I blogged my journey away from a Panel host self-managed server here..

Self Managed Costs

For $5 a month you can buy a server with enough memory to install WordPress (cheaper if you don’t need WordPress)

Vultr is great. Vultr does have ready to go servers that you can deploy that have WordPress all set up.

wordpress-template

The Vultr template above does use the Centos OS (read my guide setting up Centos on a different service provider here) but I prefer to manually setup a server with Ubuntu 16.04 OS on Vultr.

Wih a $5 server you can do what you want with it.  I have blogged before about setting up your own Server. e.g Installing Centos and Ubuntu server on Digital Ocean.  Digital Ocean does not have data centres in Australia and this kills scalability. AWS is good but 4x the price of Vultr. I have blogged about setting up and AWS server here (and upgrading an AWS instance). I tried to check out Alibaba Cloud but the verification process was broken so I decided to check our Vultr.

Manual Setup of Vultr on an Ubuntu 16.04 server

  • Deploy a Vultr Server – Guide here  ($2.5/m to New Jersey or Florida or $5/m to Sydney,  I would recommend you opt in for the auto backup for $0.50c/m and $1/m respectively).
  • Setup NGINX.
  • Setup PHP and PHP-FPM (see guide above), consider adding PHP child workers.
  • Setup and secure MySQL (see guide above), create a database for WordPress to use.
  • Instal Adminder MySQL GUI (guide here).
  • Setup a free Lets Encrypt SSL certificate (guide here).
  • Install WordPress (and Jetpack plugin).
  • Install WordPress CLI.
  • Instal the WooCommerce Storefront WordPress Theme.
  • Install WooCommerce Plugin.
  • Secure Ubuntu.
  • Also consider linking your domain to Cloudflare to boost performance, scanning your site with Qualys Freescan and OWASP ZAP).
  • Consider setting up a WordPress image compressor and CDN plugin. like EWWW.io

Manual WooCommerce Plugin Setup

Once you setup Woocommerce you can setup the store defaults. Goto the WordPress dashboard and click WooCommerce Settings

Woo Commerce Settings

Settings – General

General

  • Set Address, City and State and Postcode
  • Set allowed countries to sell in (e.g Australia)
  • Set allowed countries to ship items to (e.g Australia)
  • Set Enable Taxes
  • Set Currency
  • etc

Settings – Products

Products

  • Set Weight
  • Set Dimensions
  • Enable Product Reviews
  • Enable Star Ratings on Reviews
  • etc

Settings – Shipping

Shipping

  • Enable Shipping Calculator
  • Add Shipping Classes
  • Shipping Zones
  • etc.

Settings – Checkout

Settings checkout

  • Force Secure Checkup
  • Create a Terms and Conditions page (and set).
  • etc

Settings – Account

Accounts

  • Set Account Options
  • etc

Settings – Emails

Emails

  • Set Email Preferences
  • Set Email Header Image
  • Set Email Colour
  • Set Footer Text
  • etc

Settings – API

API

  • API can be disabled if you don’t need it.

Optional Actions

  • Setup Yoast Plugin
  • Setup other plugins

Post Site Setup

Just because your site is live does not mean you can rest.

SEO Optimization

Do use sites like https://seositecheckup.com/ and follow recommended actions to improve your SEO like updating meta tags.

More Reading

Attaching an email to your domain

You can pay $5 a month and link a G Suite email to your domain.

  • Dedicated professional Google G Suite email account for $5 a month with 30GB storage (If you don’t want ot to buy a G Suite email and link it to your domain then you don’t need this).

Once you have a G Suite account you can link other domains (and domain emails) to it. You can login to your G Suite emails via G Mail and send emails from apps or the command line.

Why Vultr

I use the server host Vultr as they have data centres all around the world and the support of great, Digital Ocean is good too but they don’t have data centres in my country (Australia). Vultr allows you to deploy all over the world upgrade servers, move servers, add storage and restore servers.

Alternatively, you can buy a $2.5/m server and generate  a static website

I use the Platforma Web HTML generator to build mobile and WCAG compliant websites.

Buying a domain,  I buy my domains from https://www.namecheap.com/  it is a good idea to look for coupons first at https://www.namecheap.com/promos/coupons.aspx before buying a domain.

Once you buy a domain you can point it to a Vultr server and upload your website.

I hope this helps someone.

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Revision History

v.1.2 WordPress WooCommerce

v1.1 SEO

v1.0 Initial Draft

How to buy a new domain (dedicated server from digital ocean) and add a SSL certificate from namecheap.

by Leave a Comment

This guide will show you how to buy a domain and and link it to a Digital Ocean VM.

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Ok, let’s get into it.

1. How to buy a new website domain from namecheap.com

1.1 Create an account at namecheap.com then navigate to registrations

1.2 Search for your domain (don’t forget to click show more to see other domain extension types).

1.3 Select the domain you want.

1.4 I am going to opt for a free year of Free WhoisGuard – (WhoisGuard is a service that allows customers to keep their domain contact details hidden from spammers, marketing firms and online fraudsters. When purchased, the WhoisGuard subscription is permanently assigned to a domain and stays attached to it as long as the fee is paid).

1.5 I will also opt-in into the discounted PositiveSSL for $2.74 (bargain) (fyi: name cheap ssl types).

1.6 Check the name cheap coupons page and apply this months coupon for 10% off.

1.7 Confirmed the order for $11.05 USD.

1.8 Congratulations you have just ordered a domain and SSL certificate.

More details: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-point-to-digitalocean-nameservers-from-common-domain-registrars

 

2. Create a http://www.c9.io account

This will give you a nice UI to manager your unmanaged server.

2.1 Upgrade from the free account to the “Micro $9.00 / monthly” at https://c9.io/account/billing (this will allow you to use the c9.io IDE to connect to as many Ubuntu VM’s as you wish).

 

3. Buy the hosting (droplet) from digital ocean

3.1 Goto https://wwww.digitalocean.com and create an account and log in.

Note: If you are adding an additional server (droplet) to a digital ocean account and you want the droplets to talk to each other make sure your existing servers have a private network setup.

3.2 Click Create Droplet

3.3 Enter a server name: e.g “yourdomainserver”

3.4 Select a Server Size (this can be upgraded later), Digital Ocean recommends a server with at least 30GB for a WordPress install (but you can upgrade later).

3.5 Select an Image (you can stick with a plain ubuntu image) but it may save you time to install an image with the LAMP stack already on it.

LAMP stack is a popular open source web platform commonly used to run dynamic websites and servers. It includes Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl and is considered by many the platform of choice for development of high-performance web applications which require a solid and reliable foundation.  I will select LAMP.

3.6 Tick “private networking” if you think you may add more servers later (growing business)?

3.7 Paste in your SSH key from your c9.io account at https://c9.io/account/ssh (this is important, don’t skip this).

3.8 Click Create Droplet

3.9 Congratulations you have just created an Ubuntu VM in the cloud.

3.10 If you type your droplets IP into a web browser it should load your pages from your web server.

3.11 You can view your ubuntu droplet details in the digital ocean portal.  You may need to reboot the server, make snapshots (backups) of reset passwords here.

3.12 You will need to change your droplets root password that was emailed to you from digital ocean (if you never recived one you can reset a root passowrd change in the digitalocean.com portal).  You can change your password by using the VNC window in the digital ocean portal https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets/ -> Access -> Console Access). If you had no luck changing you password with the VNC method you may use your Mac terminal and type: ssh [email protected] (where xx is your droplets IP) – then type yes, enter your password from the digital ocean email and change the password to a new/strong password (and write it down).

3.13 Now we will need to install the distro stable nodejs (for c9.io IDE) into the droplet by typing “sudo apt-get update” then “sudo apt-get install nodejs“.

 

4. Now we can link the digital ocean ubuntu server to the http://www.c9.io IDE.

4.1 Login to your c9.io account.

4.2 Click Create a new wordspace.

4.3 Enter a Workspace name and description.

4.4 Click Remote SSH Workspace

4.5 Enter “root” as the username

4.6 Type in your new servers IP (obtained from viewing your droplet at digital ocean https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets ).

4.6 Set the initial path as: ./

4.7 Set the NodeJS path as: /user/bin/nodejs

4.7 Ensure your SSH key is the same one you entered ito the droplet.

4.8 Click Create Workspace.

Troubleshooting: If you workspace cannot login you may need to SSH back into your droplet (via Digital ocean VNC or telnet SSH and paste your c9.io SSH key into the ~/authorized_keys file and save it). I used the command “sudo nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”, pasted in my c9.io SSH key then pressed CTRL+0 then ENTER then CRRL+X

4.9 If all goes well you will see c9.io now has a workspace shortcut for you to launch your website.

4.10 You will be able to connect to your droplet from c9.io and edit files or upload files (without the hassle of using SFTP and CPanel).

 

5. No we will link the domain name to the IP based droplet.

5.1 Login to your name cheap account.

5.2 Click “Account” then  “Domain List“, turn off domain parkingand thne click  “Manage”  (next to the new domain) then click “Advanced DNS”

5.3 Click “Edit” next to “Domain Nameserver Type” then choose “Custom“.

5.4 Add the following three name servers “ns1.digitalocean.com“, “ns2.digitalocean.com” and “ns3.digitalocean.com” and click “Save Changes“.

namecheapnameservers

5.5 Login to https://cloud.digitalocean.com/domains and select your droplet and type your domain name (e.g “yourdomain.com”) into the domain box and select your droplet

5.6 Configure the following DNS A Name records “@”-“XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX” where XXX is our server name and CName Records “www”-“www.yourdomain.com.” and “*”-“www.yourdomain.com.”

It can take from 24-48 hours for DNS to replicate around the world so I would suggest you goto bed at this stage: You can use https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/yourdomain.com to check the DNS replication progress.

5.7 But if you are impatient check out the DNS replication around the world using this link: https://www.whatsmydns.net

fyi: The full name cheap DNS guide is here.

fyi: The Digital Ocean DNS guide is located here

Setup a SSL Certificate

You can skip section 6 to 6.17 and install a free SSL certificate if you wish (read this guide on using Lets Encrypt ).

Follow the rest of this guide if you want to buy an SSL cert from Namecheap (Comodo (Lets Encrypt is easier)).

6. Login to the Namecheap server.

6.1 Open your c9.io workspace to your domain

6.2 Click the Windows then New Terminal menu

6.3 Type: cd ~/.ssh/

6.4 openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout servername.key -out servername.csr

6.2 Type the following to generate CSR files  (my server is “servername.com”, replace this with your server name ).

6.3 Using the folder structure in c9.io browser to /root/.ssh/ and open the text file “servername.csr” and copy the file contents.

6.4 In a separate window go to https://ap.www.namecheap.com/ProductList/SslCertificates paste in the “” file contents and click Submit

6.5 Verify your details and click next

6.6 Next you will need to verify your domain by downloading and uploading a file to your server. Under “DCV Method” select “HTTP” and follow the prompts at name cheap to download the file.

6.7 Complete the Form (company contacts and click next).

6.8  Go to Certificate Details page to download the validation file. Or you can wait for the email with zip file attached.

fyi: the support forums for this certificate are https://support.comodo.com (but the site is rubbish, most pages load empty (e.g this one)).

6.9 Under “DCV Methods in Use” click ‘Edit Methods” then “Download File”

6.10 Using the c9.io interface upload the file to the /var/www/html folder (drag and drop)

6.11 Wait 1/2 hour and then go back to your name cheap dashboard and see if the certificate has been verified (it may take longer than that).

6.12 After a while a certificate will be issued, Unser See Details click Download Certificate.

6.13 Upload the certificate files (“weatherpanorama_link.ca-bundle”,”weatherpanorama_link.crt” and “servername.p7b” ) files using the c9.io IDE to /root/.ssh/

6.14 Add this “ServerName localhost” to “/etc/apache2/apache2.conf”.

6.16 In a c9.io terminal run this command “sudo nano /etc/hosts” and add this line “127.0.0.1 servername.com”

6.17 Run this command in a  c9.io terminal  ‘sudo a2enmod ssl”

 

fyi: Comodo support forums: https://support.comodo.com/index.php?/Default/Knowledgebase/List/Index/1

fyi: Comodo apache certificate installation instructions: https://support.comodo.com/index.php?/Default/Knowledgebase/Article/View/637/37/certificate-installation-apache–mod_ssl

Don’t forget to cache content to optimise your Web server

Security

Having a server introduces risks, do check your website often in https://www.shodan.io and see if it has open software or is known to hackers.
todo: SSL https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/794/67/how-to-activate-ssl-certificate

Easily deploy an SSD cloud server on @DigitalOcean in 55 seconds. Sign up using my link and receive $10 in credit: https://wwww.digitalocean.com

end skip —

Seriously Lets Encrypt allows you to add an  SSL cert in minutes (over Comodo SSL certificates)

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v1.7 added some more.

How to transfer an existing website to jumba.com.au (uber.com.au)

by 1 Comment

Note: Transferring domains can be a bit like the old west, not everything goes to plan and sometimes the domain registration is transferred to jumba/uber and other times not. Worst case get on the Live Chat to Jumba/Uber and sort it out.

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P.S I don’t recommend Uber anymore, I prefer managing my own domain and email on my own server (and I moved my WordPress). Managing my own domain is cheaper and faster than a Uber domain.

1.Before you begin you will need your domain’s “EPP code” (site transfer password) from your existing host or ISP and you will need a full backup of your website (unless your are starting from scratch).

2. Goto http://www.jumba.com.au and select Transfer then enter your domain and click Check.transfer_domain_01

3. Enter your domain “EPP Code” (Authorization Key) and click Transfer Domain.

transfer_domain_02

4. Click Continue.

transfer_domain_03

5. Click “cPanel Hosting“.

transfer_domain_04

6. Choose Subscription Period and Plan and click Continue.

transfer_domain_05

7. Complete the Contact and Payment details and submit.

transfer_domain_06

8. After a few hours you will receive a confirmation email from Jumba/Uber along with login details to https://my.uber.com.au/. I would recommend you login to the my.uber portal and click Pay Invoice under billing as sometimes the 1st payment is not automatic and your new domain wont be transferred until this is paid.

9. You will receive a domain transfer confirmation email from openconnect.com.au, you will need to click the link to initiate the domain transfer.

transfer_domain_08

10. You may receive a warning from your existing domain register. In my case below I had to ignore this email.

transfer_domain_09

It may take 5 days for your old hosts to allow the domain to be transferred away.

11. At this stage you may notice your old website is still up at the old hosts. You may think that transferring the domain will transfer the domain after 5 days (wrong).  You will need to get in touch with UBER after 5 days (live chat is easiest) and ask for the “ENOM DNS record to be updated from your old host to UBER”. Once Uber say they have done this the new domain DNS records will replicate around the internet in 4-48 hours.  (If you are keen you can login to your old domain register and update the name servers for the old host and insert the new hosts DNS servers before you transfer).

  • ns1.jumba.net.au 203.88.119.146
  • ns2.jumba.net.au 113.20.10.154

You can use this site ( https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/fearby.com ) to see if your website location is updated around the world.

How to update DNS records:

12. Once your domain is transferred you have the fun of setting up an FTP account, email and new website.

13. You can access your domains cPanel via www.yourcdomain.com/cpanel (you will have a link to your cpanel from your my.uber.com.au portal).

CPanel Summary

14. Once your new domain is setup you can cancel any payments for the old domain/hosting.

Back to Fearby.com.

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