1. Introduction

These are for a friend -- take with the appropriate amount of salt.

• No representation or warranty, express or implied, with respect to the completeness, accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, or utility of these materials or any information or opinion contained herein.
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• Do not eat. Not a toy.
• If rash, irritation, redness, or swelling develops, stop reading.
• All models over 18 years of age.

1.1. GoDaddy

Stay away from GoDaddy -- too many horror stories about trying to get your domain moved elsewhere, poor customer service, etc. They've also had three breaches from 2020-2022 all carried out by the same bad guy.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/godaddy-says-a-multi-year-breach-hijacked-customer-websites-and-accounts/
GoDaddy says a multi-year breach hijacked customer websites and accounts
Fri, 17 Feb 2023 17:43:00 -0500

1.2. NameCheap

NameCheap has a good reputation. You can register your domain; a .com can go as low as $10/year depending on specials, but renewal prices are around $14/year.

If you buy a domain for (say) 5 years, set up your own reminder to renew just in case -- if you forget and the automatic Namecheap reminder doesn't work for some reason, your domain could be snapped up by someone else.

You might get a better price for a slightly different name: keriskitchen.io instead of .com -- I've been seeing a lot of geek sites with the .io extension lately.

Shared hosting:
  $16/year
  up to 3 websites
  Website builder so you can construct them yourself
  20 Gb SSD (Solid-state drive) storage -- very fast

SSL (encrypted connections to your site):
  $6/year
  You want this for ANYTHING that might be private, i.e. credit card number.

Managed Wordpress hosting:
  Very popular website/blog software -- managed is better for security
  $17/year
  10 Gb SSD
  up to 50,000 visitors/month

Fast VPN (Virtual private network):
  Good for privacy: hide your IP address, nobody logs your browsing
  You can work from anywhere with better security
  $1/year

1.3. Porkbun

Porkbun is very popular. Domains start at under $10/year.

Static hosting:
  $3/month
  if you write your own webpages that don't change often; very safe

  Free SSL certificate -- this is so people can be reasonably certain you
      are who you claim to be
  File Browser and Editor
  disk space: 2GB
  subdomains: 10  (i.e., things like sales.keriskitchen.com, mail.keri...)

Managed Wordpress hosting:
  $12/month
  disk space: 10GB
  default memory limit: 64M
  max memory limit: 128M

2. Summary

I'd go with Namecheap for now. Ask about:

• Creating a simple website. If you're going to do any selling, SSL is essential. Mention that you might like to try out simple pages on your laptop and upload them when you like.

• Don't make your email public, it makes things too easy for spammers. A WordPress site is probably easiest here -- ask how to create a "Contact Me" page that doesn't give your info away.

• WHOIS privacy. The WHOIS service lets people find out who owns a given domain in case there's a complaint about getting spammed or porn links or whatever. The problem is that spammers can get your email address unless it's redacted. Use redaction if possible; it's free, WHOIS privacy may not always be.
  WHOIS privacy services publicly register your domain under their name. For anyone outside the registrar (i.e., Namecheap or whoever you buy from), it looks like it is truly their domain and you do not actually own it. If the registrar goes rogue, the registry has no way to know it's actually your domain.
  Redaction means that the domain is internally registered under your name, but all publicly visible fields (except country and province) are simply filled with "Redacted". This is safer.

3. Feedback

Feel free to send comments.

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