Creating your own website
The art of making it in the cheapest way possible
I've finally bitten the bullet and created my own website. You can visit it at becampos.com.
So I decided it'd be a good time to write about how I've perfected the art of paying the minimum amount of money possible for a live website.
In this post, I'll cover the following:
Acquiring a domain
Building a simple website
Hosting it
Sharing it with the world
Acquiring a domain
In my opinion, one of the most important parts of a website is having a good—or at least cool—domain name. There are a lot of websites that use different TLDs (like .ai, .io) but I've always been a fan of the good old .com
Now, where should you buy your domains? That's a good question. There are tons of providers out there and I'll list a few I've used personally.
Porkbun: It's the one I've been using lately and it's quite simple and straightforward. It doesn't have the best UI but it does the deed. I once reached out to support after messing up nameservers and they helped (and it was fast too). Overall, it's a straightforward recommendation.
Namecheap: One of the most famous ones in terms of “simple and cheap”. I didn't have any issues with them but I just ended up using porkbun.
GoDaddy: If you do a 5 minute research on Reddit, you'll find tons of comments saying to avoid this one due to an immense list of complaints. Ironically, it's the one I have most domains - maybe it was because I was young, dumb and it was easier to buy because my info was already registered, but it was always the go-to before I switched to the ones above. So my recent recommendation is to not use them.
Search for your desired domain, and then swipe your credit card. If the domain you’ve picked costs more than $50 per year, it might be marked as “premium.” (Though a real premium domain can go for millions.)
Once you’ve bought a domain, the registrar will usually try to upsell you on extras like email, security, or other add-ons. I typically skip all of that—we're here to keep costs as low as possible.
As for mine, over the years, I reflected on trying to get something that was related to my name and recently I saw the domain "becampos.com” available so I thought it was a good chance to get it. I bought it on Porkbun for around 10 dollars a year - which is quite good.
Building a simple website
So depending on what you want out of a website, there's tons of ways to build it - you can use No-code builders like Wordpress, Webflow or Wix. The disadvantage of these is that you're usually stuck with them and for most things, you'll have to pay eventually.
For this case, I went with the good old HTML/CSS/JS. With AI, I find it has become quite fast to create a simple thing from scratch.
So this is my process for creating a website:
Have an idea → write everything I can about it and how I want it to look.
Give this to ChatGPT and get it to expand.
When I'm happy with the output, I paste this to Cursor and get it to create my website.
It most likely won't zero-shot your website, but with a few iterations, you can get a pretty version running. Then it's a matter of writing the content yourself (or just leave this to the AI?)
You can also find website templates online and adapt them—or even use one of the tools I recommended in my last post.
All in all, you should be able to create something, given the vast number of tools out there to help. Just keep in mind that some platforms charge to use custom domains. That’s why, for simpler projects, I usually stick with a coding stack instead of no-code.
Hosting it
Now this is where I think the magic happens. And the magicians are:
Cloudflare and Cloudflare Pages
Here's what I do:
I add my domain to Cloudflare. The free tier is amazing.
I change my nameservers to theirs (which is super straightforward thanks to their onboarding wizard)
Then, with Cloudflare Pages—since I built the website using HTML, CSS, and JS - I can deploy it for free. Even better, they let you use a custom domain for free, as long as your nameservers are set up through them.
That’s it. I now have a free hosted website. The only thing I had to pay for was the domain.
One question I’ve asked myself: why don’t I just use Cloudflare to buy the domain as well, since they offer a registrar service? The honest answer is that I always forget to check before purchasing. But for the next one, I probably will.
Other honorable hosting options I know or have used:
AWS: You can host it using EC2 and run your own instance. Even a small one can be pretty cheap—around $10/month—and you can hook it up to GitHub for easy deployment.
GitHub Pages: Great option, but the catch is that your repo needs to be open-source for it to be free, which might not always work for every project.
Heroku: Solid for small applications. I used it in the past and it worked well - not sure how it's holding up these days.
Sharing it with the world
I still haven't fully grasped this part - marketing is hard. One of the reasons I created a blog 4 years ago was to broaden my distribution channels.
That said, if you’ve built your site and got it live, here are a few details worth paying attention to:
Make it mobile-responsive: This is surprisingly easy to do with AI tools if your site is simple. Most people will check it out on their phones, especially if you're sending it to friends on WhatsApp.
Make it fast: Run it through PageSpeed and see how it performs. If your site is lightweight, you shouldn’t have much slowing it down.
Add meta/OpenGraph tags: Easy to overlook, but they help with previews when you share the link. I use an Opengraph viewer to check mine.
So yeah, that's about it when it comes to going from 0 to 1 with a website - total cost was around 10 dollars for becampos.com. If you've read this far and have any questions, feel free to ping me.
Also, try out the games I vibe-coded. They're simple, but I think they’re fun: