The Idea

So it all started when I was just scrolling through Hacker News and saw this post by Alex West. How he manages his own website and documents about his journey and learning of launching products and reporting how much monthly recurring revenue (MRR) they make. It’s a really great read.

What struck me was his clean, fast website that presented information in an easy to read way. I also admired his writing style. Therefore, I decided to build a micro website of my own.

The Setup

The following elements are used here :

Name.com as a domain registrar.
Cloudflare as a DNS provider.
Netlify as a static site hosting provider.
Google Analytics as a tracking provider.
Jekyll as a static site generator.

Got the domain for free right now through GitHub Education Pack for a year. Setting up CI/CD pipeline on Netlify was really easy, just needed to add Repository as a new site and it got deployed automatically .

For the custom domain, I used Cloudflare to add a @ A record and a www CNAME 'custom-netlify-domain' as suggested by Netlify and the website was live along with Let’s Encrypt certificate!

Monetization

Currently, this website is operating at a free cost. But after next year will be operating at a $45 loss year on year from domain renewal. This amount could increase if I have to pay for hosting in the future.

Conclusion

The website is live now! I’m excited to keep going with this journey.

Follow my progress: darkshredder.codes