Erik's Internet Challenge
Preface
Having your own Website and email at a domain that you own provides a lot of benefits. With email, you are no longer tied to your email provider, can create several users, and you gain (at least some) control of your data. With your own website, you have a voice that you control. You can use your website for anything that you want, and it can look however you want it to. You can also host services for yourself or others at subdomains.
Step 0
Buy a domain name! Get something professional sounding that you want to represent you. Your name is a good option, and it doesn’t have to be a .com. GoDaddy is a good register, but there are plenty of options. Generally you can skip buying the domain privacy protection and use a PO box for your address.
Setup email at your domain name, and say goodbye to being tied to your email provider!
If you use a Gmail or another free email address, you are stuck with that email provider. If they change their platform in a way that you don’t like, decide that you don’t want them mining and selling the information in your emails, or you want to change providers for any other reason, people will still be sending you emails at that old provider. If you are hosting your email at a domain that you own and want to change providers, you can do so without having to update your email address everywhere. Your email address won’t change.
There are never ending options when it comes to email hosting, but here is a short list of commonly used providers.
- Proton Mail
- Zoho Mail
- Google Workspace
- Office 365 You could even run your own mail server on a VPS, if you’re willing to maintain the server. While I like Proton Mail (for their privacy features) and Zoho Mail for their price, Office 365 and Google Workspace can also act as a platform for learning those products (which may provide a career benefit.)
While most providers have an option to create the required DNS records for you, I recommend doing this manually. This allows you to better get an idea of what is required for email to work. Your provider will generally tell you what records to create, and you can do some reading about those records yourself.
Build a website, and stop being an Internet serf
Building a website or blog gives you your own place on the internet. This is somewhere you can direct people, kind of like a business card or resume. You can provide some information a about yourself you and/or to link people to your other profiles on the Internet. You can also post about things that you are learning or share your opinions. Others can even follow your blog using an RSS feed.
I recommend using a static site generator to create your website. This creates a very fast and lightweight website, and gives you a better understanding of how the website works. While sites like Squarespace or Wix (or platforms like WordPress) can make it easy to run a website, I think there is more value in using a static site generator or creating it from scratch. I personally really like Hugo: https://gohugo.io/
Once you’ve created your site, you can host it on a VPS or you can host it with a web hosting provider. There are even some free hosting providers that you can use, if you have a small website. I personally use a Linode VPS to host my web server. It is just $5/mo for their smallest VPS, and it runs my site just fine. If you go this route, just be sure to keep the server patched.
If you don’t want to manage the web server yourself, your domain name registrar likely has a basic hosting package with an interface like cPanel. This is generally an easy route to hosting your own website, as the server management is done for you. There are endless other options when it comes to web hosting, and it is easy to find plenty of good options with a little research.