To create a good-looking blog website, we need to buy certain services like hosting and domain. But if you are just starting out, you don’t need to buy them. When you want to take blogging as a career choice or you want to create a professional website, then you can buy hosting, domain, themes, etc…
So, if you are a beginner, just starting out, this article will help you to create a good-looking website for free with a custom domain.
Hosting
Hosting is a service that helps us to create our blogs, post blogs, save media, etc.. We need to buy a part of hosting servers to make our blog run, online. So, we need to pay money to hosting providers to host our blog. There are many hosting providers like Godaddy, Hostinger, Hostgator, etc.
The one I recommend is Hostinger. Its UI is good, as they also have domain services, and our website will be linked easily. Even, my websites are hosted on hosting. You can set up your website for as low as ₹49/month.
How to get free hosting?
As we are creating a free blog website, we are going to use blogger. It is a free blog website-creating tool from google. To use blogger,
- Go to blogger, sign in with your Google Account
- Enter your preferred title in the given box
- Enter your preferred URL in the given box
- If it shows an error, try changing the URL
- It it shows “This address is available”, click on “Next” -We are not going to use this URL we are going to use our custom domain.Enter the title of the website in “Display Name” Box
- Click on finish
Now, that our blog / website is created, we have to setup our domain name.
Domain
A domain is the name of your website. If a reader searches sooryatej.com then he/she will be shown the home page of this website. If we buy a domain, then readers will be able to search our blog and read our articles. Domains are provided by Domain providers. As I told you about hostinger, the linking of our hosting and domain will be easy. As we are creating a free blog website, we are going to use namecheap. But the caveat here is that Namecheap doesn’t offer free domains. But I have a trick to get free domain from namecheap.
How to get a free domain?
As I told you, Namecheap doesn’t offer free domains. But when we signup with a GitHub Student Account, we will get a free “.me” domain. To do this, we have to sign up for the GitHub Student Pack with a school/university student email or with a school/university ID card(You can sign up with an ID Card, Progress Card, etc.). The signup process is easy.
After 2-7 days, you will get a mail from GitHub about your Student Pack approval. If you submit the correct documents, your account will be approved. For more info about how to apply, read this blog. After signing up, you have to login to Namecheap with a GitHub account. Then, you can purchase a custom domain with “.me” extension for free.
How to link Hosting and Domain?
After you have created an account in blogger and got a free domain from Namecheap, you have to link Hosting and Domain. To link Blogger with your custom domain, you have to write at least one article (recommended) on blogger.
After loging in to your blogger account,
- In the top left, select your blog
- Click on “settings” from the left menu
- Under Publishing, click on “Custom Domain”
- Enable Custom Domain and enter your namecheap domain
- Save the settings by clicking on “Save”
- After saving, you will get an error showing two CNAMEs:
- Blog CNAME: For name, enter the name as the subdomain, “www.” For destination, enter “ghs.google.com.”
- Security CNAME: “Name: ABC, Destination: ABC.” This is different for each person and is specific to your blog and your Google Account.
- Login to Namecheap with your Git Hub Account
- Select “Domain List” from the left menu
- Click on the “Manage” button which appears on the right side of your domain
- Go to the “Advanced DNS” tab and click on “Add a new record” which appears at the bottom of the host records
- Here you will need to create 6 records for your domain:
A Records for @ pointing to
- 216.239.32.21
- 216.239.34.21
- 216.239.36.21
- 216.239.38.21
- CNAME for www mapped to ghs.google.com
- CNAME with values provided in the Blogger account
- After setting up everything correctly, Advanced DNS tab will look like this ==>
Click on the “Save All Changes” button beside the “Add New Record” button.
It may take up to 24 hours to point your domain to blogger. After 24 hours, readers can visit your site by typing your domain name. A custom domain will increase the trust of your audience and increase the chances of you getting Google Adsense approval.
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