Background

In an effort to become more professional, I decided that I want to have a personal portfolio site, and buy a domain that uses my name. I also want to relearn React and Tailwind, so this is a good opportunity for me.

Creating a portfolio site

Since my portfolio site has no interactive experience, a static site is my end goal. Since the static site is going to be built into HTML by Vite, I could have just made a vanilla site, purely using HTML and CSS. In the end I still chose to use React and Tailwind for learning purposes.

The process is relatively simple, I ran npm create vite@latest to generate boilerplate react + typescript code, installed tailwind according to their instructions, and started coding.

Hosting the site

netlify Since this blog is already using Netlify, might as well use my existing netlify account for hosting my portfolio site.

Fun fact, my blog site is considered a single site, so a site with multiple pages is still just a single site. Good to know, especially since their free plan is good enough for me (500 sites, 100 GB monthly bandwidth, 300 build minutes).

Why didn’t I use vercel? I forgot the reason why I decided to host my blog using netlify, and I don’t feel the need to create a new account on a separate service.

Picking a domain registrar

Up next is picking from which vendor do I want to buy my domain. There are a few choices that I considered:

Local registrars (niagahoster, domainesia)

I thought that they might be cheaper due to regional pricing, but that is not the case. Registering a new domain costs ~$7-$8.5, but the renewal costs ~$12. They also didn’t offer WHOIS privacy protection, which is something to consider.

Namecheap

Registering costs $6.49, but renewal costs $16.98. My friend uses this because they wanted to use a .dev domain, but after a lot of thought I decided I wanted a .com domain, and namecheap is not very cheap.

Porkbun

Many people online recommended porkbun, to the point that I suspected it could have been astroturfed. Registering and renewal costs $11.06, so I tried to make an account. After inputting my details, they wanted to take a picture of my government ID, which made me hesitate, and ended up going with another domain registrar.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is actually the cheapest of the bunch, coming in at $10.44 for registering and renewal. The few reasons people don’t like to use Cloudflare is that Cloudflare does not allow you to change the name servers used.

Setting up custom domain & subdomains in Netlify

netlify-custom Setting up custom domain and subdomains is quite simple in Netlify. Go to your site’s overview -> Domain management, and then press “Add domain alias”.

cloudflare Then, add a CNAME record that points to the netlify link that contains the site.

Closing thoughts

I hope my experience with Netlify and Cloudflare domains may be of help to someone reading this article. Since I’m already paying for my custom domain, I want to start making projects that use my domain. Cheers!