I finally decided to commit to getting a website up and running for my IT portfolio (and for fun, of course).

After much research and ignoring warnings I decided to go with porkbun.com((#not sponsored) for my domain registrar, web hosting, and email hosting. I know, I know… I’m supposed to keep everything separate in case I have issues with any one provider (fault tolerance) want to change down the road due to better pricing or features elsewhere, but the porkies are just so cute.

All joking aside, after much deliberation I wanted to just keep things simple. This is my first website and I really just wanted it to be a personal blog for my IT journey. That being said, the pricing with porkbun was nothing to shake a stick at, mostly because they weren’t offering a +50% discount on everything for the first signing term and then inflating everything afterwards. I don’t want to pay for domain privacy… I don’t want to pay for my SSL certificate… I definitely don’t want any of these things to double in price after however long.

For those of you that do not know, an SSL certificate is that reassuring little padlock by the url in your browser’s address bar. TL;DR if you do not set this up for your website then your web browser will throw an alert that the website cannot be trusted. Most reasonable people at this point will quickly accept the prompt to leave the website, as any semi security conscious person should. To get just a bit more technical, the certificate is important to your browser because this is what allows a secure connection between a guest and the website (https:443) and without it all communications would be in plain text (http:80), so this is vital for modern day websites to have. I do not appreciate an up charge for this must have security feature, and I especially don’t find the pricing scheme of being free for a year and then $11/month for a year or $5/month for 5 years to be very enticing as someone launching their first website.

Another thing I mentioned was whois domain privacy… if you don’t know about it yet then you will definitely appreciate this. I don’t want to get TOO deep into it, so here is the short and sweet: ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a non profit organization overseeing unique identifiers used on the internet such as domain names and IP addresses. ICANN requires that registrants (a purchaser of a domain name) provide accurate contact information for domains, this is where the WHOIS database comes in. The WHOIS database is essentially a publicly accessible directory that contains detailed information about domain names. It allows people to look up information about a domain’s registration, such as who owns it, how to contact the owner, when it was registered, and other important details related to the domain’s registration status. This information includes your name, email, physical address, and possibly also your phone number. Whois domain privacy essentially hides this information with the registrar’s (the one who sold you your domain), so you can see why I would also consider this an essential for owning a website.

So that explains why I selected porkbun for my first website. Mostly because I didn’t want to pay literally 2-3 times as much (more in some cases) for features that most people would consider essential, but also because I am wanted to just make things more simple and put all my eggs in one basket… I know, I know… but I did it anyway.

I decided to go with a shared hosting with a c-panel, this way I can still use wordpress but actually still have access to most of the backend for learning purposes. Even though I’m still a noob at a lot of this, it wasn’t an overly simple process to get everything set up. Sure the email was technically one button click, and the dmarc/dkim/spf, but I ended up having to install the WP Mail SMTP plugin for my wordpress admin emails to correctly work (this was the most difficult task). I sorta deleted my .htaccess file at one point because I was having problems logging into /wp-admin, but ended up just needing to click on word press manager instead of word press management… I also had less than a ton of fun figuring out how to customize the appearance of my website, create new pages, posts, etc.

I went through quite the troubleshooting process to narrow things down before I ended up fixing wp admin emails. This included changing sql database entries through myPHP in the c-panel (didn’t work), trying different email addresses, sending emails from the porkbun webmail to external email, sending external email to porkbun webmail, sending the porkbun webmail to itself, checking the message headers to verify my dmarc/dkim/spf (and checking those things and playing with them in the dns records), etc. I eventually narrowed everything down to the point where I had to try a plugin, so I got the wp mail smtp, configured it wrong, and then actually did it right and got the test email to successfully send. Alas the admin emails still were not going out, so I tried it under google (incorrectly, again), and then went back to a porkbun config after checking the error logs, and it finally worked.

So I don’t know that I should have spent the $24 for a year of porkbun email hosting, but I did.

Despite the fact that that the setup was a lot more challenging than I initially expected, and at one point I had submitted a support ticket believing I may have just wasted my money not following the warnings of people to separate your domain from your host, I stand at the end of the initial setup with a functioning and decent looking website and a bit more experience working with wordpress, c-panel, sql databases, php (forgot to mention I had to adjust some php code to hide some theme template text on my website), dns records, and more knowledge of the world of websites.

I also still love the adorable pigs of porkbun. First website, learning experience, but pigs, cheap investment… success.

I originally was going to go all in on hostgator.

Then I was going to get my domain name from namesilo and webhosting from knownhost.

I almost went all in on namecheap. I went all in on porkbun. Maybe I’ll lose my domain name in the end, or maybe I’ll hold onto my porkbun and just ditch the email hosting… or maybe I’ll keep all my porkbuns for this simple blog.

Either way I have a website now and I can consider myself a little more tech savvy. Let’s go.

(p.s. porkbun support basically ghosted me then replied after business hours that they were glad my issue was resolved)