Hello, %username%!

Today, many beginner web developers make a big mistake, and not just one. They build something, then buy hosting. After that, they purchase a domain. They register and connect an SSL certificate. To save myself from negative karma, let me just explain how to avoid wasting money on their test projects.

By the way, there is absolutely no advertising here, even if it seems that way — this is just another tutorial, detailing the necessary resources and maximum clear.

I recommend creating a new email for each such project and registering everywhere with it, rather than your personal email.

Hosting

When you search for "Free Hosting", Google first, naturally after the ads, suggests 000webhost.com. This is quite an interesting hosting — having used it for two years, I noticed that the allowed number of free sites and other conditions constantly change, but the main thing is that it remains the most convenient.

So, today they offer: 

• 1 free website
• 1 MySQL database
• Multiple versions of PHP
• Domain connection
• 300mb of SSD space (it used to be one gigabyte, such tightwads!)
• FTP

It used to be better, but I think this is sufficient for our test projects. Moreover, these downsides are compensated by a user-friendly control panel, which not many of its competitors can boast.

What to do?

1. Registering — it’s easy!
2. Click "Create Site" and do what it asks.

That’s it — we will return to 000webhost later. For now…

Domain Name

There is no perfect option for work projects here. But we are going to work on mini-projects and we don’t need much — just any second-level domain. To help us — Freenom, it is also the first in search results, and it has no analogs — they bought all of them and have received a monopoly on selling their domains from certain countries.

So we’ve approached the problem — on www.freenom.com only domains from various remote African countries are available, where they decided to promote the internet by freely distributing their domains: ".tk«, «.ml", ".gq", ".cf", ".ga". Naturally, they are just as money-loving as 000webhost and provide the domain for free for only 12 months at most, but it can be re-registered later.

So, let’s choose.

Action Sequence #1

1. Registering — it’s easy!
2. Go to the "Services" tab at the top and then — "Register a new domain."
3. Then the service will guide you through the process.
4. After successfully registering the domain, click "Services" again, and then — "My domains." Don’t close this tab.

Let's return to our free hosting…

Step-by-Step Guide #2

1. We go back to 000webhost and see our site with an unattractive third-level domain name (yoursite.000webhost.com). Let's fix this.
2. Hover over the nice image — the text ‘»Manage Website’ appears, click on it.
3. In the left sidebar, we see ‘Tools’, we follow the link.
4. Intuitively, we choose the option ‘Specify Website Address’
5. There is a button — ‘+ Add Domain’, let’s click!
6. A lovely modal window appears where we select the first option — we will ‘park’ our domain.
7. We enter ‘Domain Name’, click the ‘magic button’ [keep this tab in the background] and go to the tab where we left Freenom.

Step-by-Step Guide #3

1. Here, in the table, opposite the domain, we click the ‘Manage Domain’ button.
2. When you click on the ‘Management Tools’ tab, a select will appear where you need to choose Nameservers.
3. Switch ‘Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)’ to ‘Use custom nameservers (enter below)’
4. Enter ‘ns01.000webhost.com’ at the bottom first, and in the next line — ‘ns02.000webhost.com’, and then — ‘Change nameservers’
5. We return to ‘Webhost’ and next to our domain ‘pending’ we select in the dropdown ‘Manage’ and ‘Check nameservers’
6. We see that our domain has become active, we click ‘Manage’ again and link it to our yoursitename.000webhost.com

Yes, now everything is ready, but we haven’t solved the last issue that we need to resolve for free — SSL certificate.

Cloudflare

«Internet Crab‘ — a wonderful alternative name — for such a great free service. I think it suits us. Additionally, CloudFlare it will protect us from DDOS attacks and cache our site, speeding it up, and they will give us a free certificate. This is very convenient.

Easy

1. We register with CloudFlare, choosing the free plan.
2. We add our site: you need to go and change the nameservers in Freenom again — remove the old ones and put the ones suggested by the service.
3. They will immediately offer to set up SSL, I recommend the ‘Flexible’ option.
4. There are many interesting settings.

In conclusion

So, your site is set up and is no worse than if you had paid for it. But I recommend adding this to

<head>

your site, on all pages, this:

img[alt="www.000webhost.com"] {display: none;}

This way, you will hide the annoying 000webhost logo. Many engines, for example, Egey, magically remove it themselves.

With some skill, it is possible to complete all these actions in about 45 minutes. Thus, "A Couple of Lines".

I do not hope this article has immediately benefited you, but you can always bookmark it on Habr 🙂 Thank you for reading!

Source: habr.com