How I registered domain, built & hosted my website completely for free
Hello, I hope you’re doing good. In this article I will share brief information about how I build my portfolio site for free.
STEP 1: Register a domain for free
Mercantile provides free .np domain registration to Nepalese citizen, NRN, NRV & Company registered in Nepal. You can find more information from FAQs page from here: register.com.np FAQs .
Documents are required for .NP registration
In case of Personal
Nepalese citizenship or passport or driving license or voter’s card or
Non-Resident-Nepalese ID card or
Nepalese resident visa for foreign nationals
In case of local entities :
Certificate of registration of company/firm/partnership/organization
In case of foreign entities registered in Nepal :
Certificate of registration of branch or liaison office or
Certificate of affiliation with Social Welfare Council.
In case of non-incorporated entities doing business in Nepal such as Permanent Establishments or Non-incorporated Joint Venture Entities: PAN registration certificate.
In case of any entities (local or foreign)having business interests in Nepal:
Certificate of trademark registration in Nepal or Official filing receipt of trademark application issued by the Department of Industry (to be supported with actual trademark registration certificate within 3 years of domain registration)
As I registered for my personal domain. I only submitted Citizenship ID Card Scan copy & Application Letter. You can find the Sample Application Letter here. It might take up to couple of days sometimes to get verified.
While filling up domain registration form you will be asked to give the name servers. I would recommend to use Cloud Flare which provides lots of web tools including DNS tool. Later on you’ll use it to point your domain or subdomain to the hosting server.
- For that, You need to create Cloud Flare account.
- You need to add bob.ns.cloudflare.com & kara.ns.cloudflare.com
- After domain is registered successfully, add your domain into your Cloud Flare account
If doesn’t have mentioned documents then you could try other free domain alternatives like>
- If you’re a student get GitHub Student Developer Pack, you could get .me domain for free.
- You could also try some free domain provider like Freenom
STEP 2: Build Website
I built my personal website using React JS> Next JS & Chakra UI.
React JS is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
Next.js gives you the best developer experience with all the features you need for production: hybrid static & server rendering, TypeScript support, smart bundling, route pre-fetching, and more. No config needed.
Chakra UI is a simple, modular and accessible component library that gives you the building blocks you need to build your React applications.
Next JS & Chakra UI you can build website very easily. You can follow their official documentations. They have provided detailed guide in their documentation.
It took me couple of days to complete my basic personal website, As I already had knowledge on React & Next JS. But Chakra UI was completely new. You can choose other web frameworks too.
STEP 3: Hosting
After I completely build my personal website, the next step is to make it available or live so anyone in internet can visit my website. For hosting I Chosen Vercel, it provides free static site hosting. You could use other static free hosting like Github pages, Surge, but I find Vercel more advantages over other alternatives.
In Vercel, I can directly import my specific Github projects by giving permission to the repo containing my Website source files (build on Nextjs). Vercel does the production building stuff for you so you don’t need to run npm production build. It got triggered when any updates on any changes on main branch is made & it immediately runs all build stuffs.
After successful build we need to link/point our domain to Vercel , you could setup your domain from the project settings page’s Domains section.
You could check out my portfolio site build here. Please let me know if you want to learn more details about the domain setup, (ReactJS, NextJS, ChakraUI), Github Vercel setup then I could come up with extended version of this article.
Thank you for reading. Valuable feedbacks are appreciated.
