How Create a Professional Website for just N999 using the best servers Online

Yes it’s possible to have a website so cheap if you are a techie person.

Before I break it down for you, let me give a little background

Background

If you have watched the trends, cost of storage devices has continued to go down which has led to cheaper web and file hosting.

The internet right now is full of a lot of free places you can keep files and documents for free or at a very cheap rate.

About The free Web host

“GitHub is a web-based hosting service for version control using Git. It is mostly used for computer code. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. according to Wikipedia”_

Github has been a site that hosts codes and program files for free for 11years and since you can access your code from anywhere, they now made it possible to access it using your own domain name.

There it is - a free hosting space that can show your website and completely legal. Since it’s used to host applications and codes, you cant host any website that requires server-side interaction with a database.

Let me explain that.

GitHub only hosts static websites built on HTML, css, Javascript etc. If your site requires asp.net, php, jsp etc it will not work.

But if you must use them and GitHub, there is a workaround by using Json, cross-origin js and another webserver that supports server-side scripting.

Just buy your domain name (at about N999) and host for free.

How to host your website files

Step 1: Create a free Account on Github

Step 2: Create Github repository with your code

Select the option Project Site to get started

• Go to https://pages.github.com
• Select the option
  Project Site to find the instructions on how to create a basic page from scratch or a custom theme

Step 3: Setup Github Pages for the repository

Go to Settings for your repository

Choose to serve your website from the master branch

Go to Settings for your repository. In the Github Pages section, choose the master branch to serve your website from.

Once you�ve done that, you can go to https://.github.io/repository to see your website in action as shown below.

Step 4: Add custom domain

Add the custom domain that you have bought and save it.

If you don’t have your own domain name, you can click here to register one. You can get a domain on .com.ng for as low as N999.00 as the time of writing this. It may go up soon.

Your website is now ready with your own custom domain!

So, we have everything setup on Github. We�ll start with setting up Cloudflare to jazz up your website with all the powerful features I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Step 5: Adding https

To ensure your website can be accessed using “https://….” instead of “http://..”, you can use Cloudflare for that. As you know, https has become the internet standard for accessing websites because of the encryption it provides between the website visitor and website

Setup your domain on Cloudflare

Create an account for free on Cloudflare here.

If you are using it for the first time, you should see a screen like the image shown below.

If you have used it before, you can click on the Add Site option in the navigation bar on the top right to add a new domain. Enter the domain you want to manage and click on Begin Scan.

Step 6: Setup DNS Records for your domain

Setup DNS records for apex domain. It is denoted by @.

Final DNS record list

In this step, we inform Cloudflare to point our domain to the Github Pages server using two A Record DNS entries:

1. 192.30.252.153

2. 192.30.252.154

Once you have set this up, all requests to your custom domain i.e. yourcustomdomain.com will be routed to your website on Github on Step 4.

There�s one more step involved before we move on to the next stage. Oftentimes, you would want to use a subdomain like www for your website, i.e. www.yourcustomdomain.com For this, you will need to add a CNAME record DNS entry which will point your subdomain(www) to your apex domain(@).

Once you have set this up, all requests to your custom subdomain i.e. www.yourcustomdomain.com will be routed to your website on Github on Step 4.

NOTE: Don�t try to go access your custom domain right away. It won�t work. We have only done the Cloudflare to Github setup. We still have to do the DNS Registrar -> Cloudflare setup. This will come up in Step 8.

Click Continue to go to the next step.

Step 7: Setup a free Cloudflare account and Choose the Free plan

Create an account at cloudflare.com

The Free plan for Cloudflare provides a lot of sophisticated options required for this setup

Step 8: Update Nameservers on your DNS Registrar

Once you�re on this page, keep it open in one tab and open your DNS Registrar�s (the place from where your bought your domain) site in another. If you�re using one of the following registrar�s then the links to understand how to change Nameserver are:

1. Bigrock
2. Namecheap
3. GoDaddy

You need to replace the existing Nameservers in your Domain settings with the one�s on the Cloudflare page that is open in the other tab.

An example of how it would look like after you�ve updated your Nameserver settings in your DNS registrar

You�ve successfully setup your custom domain to use Cloudflare as a DNS provider. You can go to the Overview option on the top and you will find that it is still waiting for your Nameserver change to be processed.

Once the Overview tab says Status: Active, you can now try to visit your site using your custom domain, AND IT SHOULD JUST WORK!

Step 9: Configure Minification

In the Speed setttings, in the Auto Minify section, choose the option to auto-minify everything: Javascript, CSS, HTML. This will be done by Cloudflare on-the-fly once and then cached. Whenever any of your assets change, Cloudflare will do this again for you.

The advantage of minification is that the size of the file delivered to your browser is a lot less since it strips off unwanted spaces and comments.

Step 10: Configure Browser Cache Expiration

Cache Expiration set to 1 month

If you scroll down on the same page as Auto Minify, you will find the Browser Cache Expiration section. It should be set to 30 days/1 month, ideally, for WebpageTest to not give you a warning. What this time indicates is that, once your site is loaded in any browser, then the

browser will not request any assets for a second time until the Browser Cache time period expires for those assets.

Example: The iphone.png image loads from your server for the first time (22.3KB in 349ms) All subsequent requests to fetch that resource are served from disk cache which means it is
almost instantaneously available (in 5ms)

Before we move on to the next step, please check the Crypto settings on Cloudflare. It should say Active Certificate in the SSL section. (Note: Try reloading the page. Sometimes it doesn�t update). In the next two steps, we are going to make your site serve via HTTPS always. For that to work without any problems, it is important that you have an active certificate on Cloudflare.

The SSL section shows Authorizing Certificate after your Nameserver changes have been processed. Once an SSL certificate for you has been issued, this message will change to Active Certificate.

Step 11: Configure Page Rules In this step, we are going to do two things:

1. Redirect all requests for www.yourcustomdomain.com to yourcustomdomain.com

2. Redirect all requests for http://yourcustomdomain.com to https://yourcustomdomain.com

Go to the Page Rules setting and click on Create Page Rule.

For handling the www.yourcustomdomain.com to yourcustomdomain.com redirect, replace tweetify.io with yourcustomdomain.com name. Click Save and Deploy.

For handling the https://yourcustomdomain.com to https://yourcustomdomain.com redirect, replace tweetify.io with yourcustomdomain.com name. Click Save and Deploy.

Step 12: Configure HSTS

Go to the Crypto settings and scroll down to the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) section. Click on Enable HSTS. This will ask you to acknowledge that you know what you are doing. Before you select I understand, let me tell you why we need to enable this setting:

If a user has opened your website in the past, from then onwards whenever the user tries to access your website, they will always be taken to the HTTPS version of your site. This makes your site load a little faster on subsequent visits because the HTTP to HTTPS redirect happens on the client and not via the Cloudflare Page Rule that we added in Step 11.

Once you go to the next step, you should enable all the settings as shown below. You can read more details about these options here and here

Screenshot of HSTS settings in Cloudflare

That�s it. You�re all set to show off your website to the world!

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If you have a difficulty in following this, you can contact us but if you would like use to set this up for you, it will cost just N10,000.00

Click here to Learn more