You’ve got a new idea for a product, or a store, or maybe just a neat pun. So it’s time to buy a domain, isn’t it?
That’s the easy part. Put in your credit card info, add a reminder for next year so you remember to renew it, and you’re set. But that’s far from the end! There’s a lot of work to make sure everything is set up correctly, and the best time to do it is right now, before it becomes “scary” to tweak the DNS config.
I am not affiliated with any of these services, and I don’t make any money on these recommendations.
Set up nameservers
Before getting into the weeds, I highly recommend immediately signing up for a free CloudFlare account and pointing the nameservers at their service.
I recommend this because their anti-DDoS service is simply the best in the game, and their API makes a lot of stuff very straightforward down the line.
Other good free options are Bunny DNS and ClouDNS. Both have fairly generous free plans, but can add costs if you grow beyond one domain or get a large query volume. Those are both good problems to have though.
While you’re in the registrar control panel (the site you bought the domain from), also ensure that whois privacy is enabled.
There are plenty of other free DNS hosting services out there. Just be sure that whatever you choose has MFA on login, a well documented API, and the ability to import & export records. A responsive support team is also a huge bonus (if you can find one).
Whatever you do, make sure you point your nameservers away from services like “GoDaddy”.
Set up email
The first decision is if you want to be able to send outbound email as your domain. Either way, you’ll be able to receive inbound mail.
If you don’t need to send email as the domain, a DNS hosting service like CloudFlare lets you route all inbound mail messages to an external mailbox. This is also usually free, and is a great way to get up and running.
If you do want to send email as the domain, you’ll need to pay for hosting. My favourite options:
- mailbox.org - $2.5 EUR/month
- Fastmail - $5 USD/month
Other, often costlier, hosting is also available via Microsoft and Google’s business email hosting offerings. I wouldn’t recommend that unless it is believed that the project will soon grow to more than ~5 team members in the short term.
I highly recommend that a “catch-all” address is setup, so that any address can be used. This is great for personal domains, and a great place to start with a business domain.
Otherwise, make sure to create aliases on the main mailbox for the common “well-known” addresses: info@, contact@, sales@, support@, security@, privacy@, abuse@, webmaster@, postmaster@
Even if it’s not for business purposes, it’s a good idea to set these up now. If nothing else, you can dump them into a folder you won’t read. It’s a good idea to set up inbox rules at this stage as well.
Another important thing to consider is that sending mail from your domain may not work right away. Many big email services like Google and Microsoft will outright block newly registered domains, or those without any “reputation” yet. Don’t worry, it will work in a few weeks! Setting up SPF and DKIM correctly will also help with this.
Set up DMARC monitoring
While setting up the email service, be sure to configure DKIM and DMARC records. DKIM is a protocol for signing outbound mail to guarantee its authenticity, and DMARC is a way for the receiver of DKIM-authenticated mail to classify & report back to the sender.
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine;
This is usually included in the set-up instructions for the mail service when you add a custom domain, usually by creating a TXT record for _dmarc.yourdomain.com.
This will instruct the mail server which receives messages from your domain to quarantine messages that don’t conform to the DMARC policy. In addition to deciding whether or reject, quarantine, or allow messages that don’t comply with the dmarc policy, it can also be configured to send reports.
I recommend setting up a service like dmarcreport to analyze these reports and help alert you if there is a problem with your domain’s configuration or potential abuse by an attacker.
To set this up, modify the DMARC record to send reports to the service:
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:[email protected]; ruf=mailto:[email protected]; fo=1
After this is configured, the service will send a weekly report with how many emails were accepted for each destination service.
Get a website live
Next, it’s time to get a website setup!
The easiest, and costliest, is to use a web builder service. Squarespace is the most common (and heavily advertized) of these. They’re fast and easy to work on, but they do come with a steep cost ($20/mo ++), and are not exportable for use with another host.
A slightly cheaper option is to use a wordpress host:
- wordpress.com - $10 USD/mo
- bluehost.com - $5 USD/mo
- whc.ca - $3 CAD/mo
These are much more portable and customizable, but take a bit more work.
For a more frugal approach, it’s also possible to do all the building yourself!
If you don’t have web-dev experience, a static site generator like hugo or jekyll is a quick way to get a basic site online. There are a wide variety of themes available for these.
To host these, you can often get free hosting for static sites:
- Netlify - $0/mo
- CloudFlare Pages - $0/mo
- DigitalOcean - $0/mo
All of these support premium features at a higher cost, but simple web hosting and TLS are free. I’ve used all three of these in the past with great results. You will eventually out-grow this solution, at the very least they can be an excellent stop-gap until more time can be spent on building a custom site.
Another option is to set up an account on Oracle, Google, or AWS cloud and use the free tier to host your site. It’s a bit more work, but can be a great learning experience. Just have a plan for when things go wrong, because they will eventually.
Get your site searchable
Once your site is ready to go, it’s important to set up search indexing.
Google and Bing will both crawl and index your site as they discover links from other sites, but it’s much better to set it up deliberately.
After submitting a sitemap, you should start getting clicks and impressions in not too long.
Setting up the search consoles is also important because if your site gets flagged for spam or malware, that’s where you’ll see it and submit an appeal.
Other free monitoring services
- mxtoolbox.com offers free weekly reports on your domain’s blacklist status
- Google Postmaster Tools will help diagnose mail deliverability problems
- UptimeRobot is free for personal use, and can alert you when your site goes offline or does not return a certain keyword
It’s a great idea to get all of this stuff up and running now as well.
And a couple hours, your domain is up and running! If you’ve played your cards right, the only cost should be the annual renewal fee, about $20/year.
I’ve done this exact procedure a couple dozen times, and each time I learn something new. But, the most important thing is to set up as much as you can right away. There will never be an easier time than now. Moving email or web hosting can be a real pain, so be sure to make a cost and convenience conscious decision!