Requirements
Basic domain knowledge
You own a domain - in my case ‘echtebaas.nl’ - There are several domain registrars available who can set this up for you. Its like a few bucks per year you need to pay for it. Often they set this up for you with alot fluff. However there are enough tools available how to set a domain properly. And alot websites wants you to set this up correctly so don’t sweat it if you have no idea how to manage a domain.
Making your domain a bit more secure
The owner of the host will give you as consumer the rights to maintain the DNS records, however for the best price i wouldnt suggest you to get your domain directly from Cloudflare provider. Instead , i would suggest you to registrate your domain seperate. Then tell them that you like to have cloudflare host that domain. Your registrar will do this for you. You pay the registrar for the domain. And you will set your DNS records at Cloudflare. The reason why you would want to use Cloudflare , is that you can proxy your traffic through cloudflares servers and you dont expose your services directly.
Basic versioning knowledge (git)
Ofcourse you need some place to store your files. In most cases you end up paying for hosting. But you dont have to as long the application is hardly using any resources. So we make some webpage in pure html. Not PHP. We will upload those pages to our repository. In this case Github.com. You need basic knowledge of git.
Basic deploy knowledge (digital ocean)
So there are many cloud services available. Digital Ocean has the possiblity for you to host a website for free (as long you dont use databases or php) this should be a static website. Now digital ocean will ask for your repository to get the source files.
In short if we commit a change to our git repository, digital ocean will automatically build the app / website for you. Ofcourse this will be available on digital ocean domain. At digital ocean we now can add a domain to our app. And this is where Digital ocean give you the proper information how to set this up correctly at your DNS provider. Cloudflare in our case.
All together - the result
I might say the result is a solid and cheap solution:
- we develop a website
- push that code to github
- digital ocean builds the website and makes it available.
- cloudflare makes the website available for your domain and protects digital ocean.