As a student, I’m always searching for ways to reach my goal as cheap as possible. Today I needed to set up a hosting for a project I’m working on. The hosting needs to be reached with a top-level domain and it will need an e-mail address under the same top-level domain. These things are important to look legitimate to the visitor.
Let’s get started. First we’ll need a domain name of course. You can find them at several places. Don’t buy any hosting at all, just make sure you can change the name servers of the domain. I can help you to get a cheap domain name, please contact me personally for more information.
Next part is to create an account on ZoneEdit.com. ZoneEdit is a free DNS service and domain manager. At first Signup, you can choose for a free trial of 5 zones(=5 domains). I recommend you to use accurate information. You’ll receive an e-mail with your login information. After you login, you can start adding zones, look for the link ‘Add Zones’. Now enter your domain name and click ‘Add Zone’. It will create a default configuration with a MailForward™ so all e-mail traffic will get redirected to your account.
To give ZoneEdit the control over your domain, we need to change the name servers of your domain. Most likely the name servers given by ZoneEdit will be ns4.zoneedit.com and ns8.zoneedit.com, to be sure just just check the box on top of the configuration page. You probably have to ask your provider (where you’ve bought your domain) to do that for you, if not they should explain how you can. When the name servers get set, it still can take a few hours until it is propagated.
In the mean time, we’ll set up our hosting. I’ve chosen My3gb.com to handle this. First of all because of the obvious 3GB of space with FTP access and second because they have support for PHP and MySQL. They are Ad-free. The only limit they have is a 1MB maximum file size, but most files for regular websites don’t reach that size. Now go and register yourself, you’ll receive an e-mail with your information if everything went correct. Next you can login and go to ‘Account settings’. Here you can add an extra domain to this hosting, just fill in your domain here. If you’ve read the extra information given, you’ll notice they ask you to change the name servers to the ones from my3gb. Don’t do this, it is not needed. By adding your extra domain here, My3gb will listen to that domain and show the correct website.
Let’s get back to ZoneEdit now, hopefully the name servers are propagated by now. If not, no worries, it can take some time. We can already set the WebForward and an Alias. First we’ll do a WebForward, just pick the menu item or click on ‘WebForwards’ in the overview. Put in as destination ‘http://www.domain.tld’ where domain.tld is your actual domain. and click ‘Add New’. After this you will be asked to redirect ‘http://www.domain.tld’ to ’http://www.domain.tld’ but that is just ridiculous, just go for the ‘not recommended’ because that is what we want to accomplish. Now ‘http://domain.tld’ will forward to ‘http://www.domain.tld’. Go back to ‘View’ and verify your actions. Next is the Alias (or CNAME) to your hosting. Click on ‘Aliases’ in the menu or in the overview. Enter ‘www’ in the ‘Alias’ box and the URL to your hosting (accountname.my3gb.com) in the ‘Actual Name’ box and click ‘Add New Alias’. Go back to ‘View’ and again verify your actions.
This is basically it, you’ve set up your domain in ZoneEdit.com and your hosting at My3gb.com. Your files can be uploaded to the ftp server of your My3gb account. A MailForward™ can be set via MailForwards, which is self explanatory, a tutorial on setting up your mail account with this will follow soon.
