Hosting this site

This is how this website is hosted. I think it is a great solution, very cheap and simple. TLDR, Cloudflare DNS with static website using Cloudflare pages. Entirely "free". And Cloudflare Email Routing (for email on the domain as well)

 

 

Cloudflare DNS

Cloudflare is great for DNS hosting. Entirely "free".

So moving the domain over was simple, just log in to registra, point dns to Cloudflares. Then you can use Cloudflare for hosting the DNS. It was great, even auto discovered all of my DNS entries and auto created them in Cloudflare. 

Cloudflare Pages

This is the awesome part, Cloudflare will host simple static websites with full integration to github for "free". Everytime you push a new build of the pages to githib, Cloudflare will automatically clone the repo and then push it to their systems. So I press "sync" in Publii and it then goes ahead and sends it to Github, which then sends it to Cloudflare Pages, which is then hosted for me.

GitHub

To use Cloudflare's pages, you need to make a Github account with a repository specifically for your website. It has to be in the "main" repository. Grab a copy of the API key and give that to Cloudflare Pages.

Publii

This is what I really like. It makes a good looking complex website which is responsive to Mobile / Desktop and great SEO. All STATIC. So you make the site on your computer using the Publii application, which then generates the site to static HTML which then sends it to GitHub which then sends it to Cloudflare Pages. Simple to add a new post. Easy to configure, found a nice little theme. It seems this is a "wordpress" replacement. So instead of hosting WordPress and getting hacked all the time, just use this to host the site statically. Simple and beautiful! 

https://getpublii.com/

Email - CloudFlare Email Routing

Cloudflare now offer Email Routing, so they will receive emails on a domain, and then forward to your email address of your choice. This way I can forward all emails for *@elneilo.com and send it to a central gmail.com account. Then you can setup gmail.com to send email claiming to be @elneilo.com. Do some SPF settings and all good!

In Gmail "treat is as a alias" and send emails using smtp.gmail.com (use a app password).

SPF Record

Set it to something like the following

"v=spf1 include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net include:_spf.google.com ~all"

dmarcian.com

You can signup for dmarcian.com and have it collect your DMARC reports. I dont really send enough email on this address to even get reports generated too much (as I mainly send to other gmail.com address's') It will only keep ~7 days of logs, so keep that in mind.

Cusdis

I have added "free" comments. These are supplied by Cusdis, which is a simple open source comment hosting system. It was simple, download the plugin, add to Publii. Edit the theme as it was a older one, then post comments :) I like it. Email notifications when comments are posted, approved comments only. Shall see if there is a lot of spam.

This article was updated on May 12, 2022

Shooter

Its me. elNeilo / Shooter / Neil.

Please Leave Comments