I got invited to participate in a survey on LinkedIn. It was about ThymeLeaf. I used ThymeLeaft for a bit during my first job. So, I decided to do it. The survey was on G2 and I got a $10 virtual card as a reward for participating.
I was thinking of things where I could use this virtual card. It’s an international card, so I could use it in most of the sites I wanted to. The very first thing I did was to sign up for AWS 1 year free tier account. I also tried to sign up for GCP, but unfortunately they don’t support Virtual Cards.
Buying a custom domain seemed to be the perfect thing for me. So, I headed on to GoDaddy and looked what’s available. After some digging, I settled for jahir.me. It was cheap, short and easy to remember. I got it for like 3$ for 1 year.
This was the first time I was managing a domain and all the things seemed pretty complex. I still have to Google everytime I need to change a CNAME record. I found GoDaddy’s domain management interface pretty poorly designed so I moved my domain management to Cloudfare. Cloudflare’s interface feels quite intuitive to me. I also got free SSL which means https for my website for mee. Sweet deal!
For future domains, I’ll probably buy it directly from Cloudflare or use Namecheap. These seem to be the better options with much friendlier tools.
Ultimately, having a custom domain is pretty sweet. I host my site on GitHub. This blog is also hosted on GitHub. I have also configured an email server with Zoho for experimenting, and it was easy to set up. And all of this was done for about 3$. This feels like pretty good utility for the amount spent!