this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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I am trying to get a local org I am in set up with a domain and website just to have a place to point people for everything. We would like to keep it as cheap as possible. I figure we need the following:

-Domain name (going to use namecheap probably)

-VPS host (I haven't done this before, it looks like racknerd may be way to go?). I assume I will probably only need 1GB of memory as it will just be a static webserver but that may be too little, not 100% sure.

-Email host. This is one of two real reasons I want to own the domain, we have multiple uses for email but currently everything is under one gmail address and a lot gets lost in the clutter. A few people in our org would like to stick with gmail but I am open to other suggestions. Definitely do not want to deal with self hosting on this.

-Website builder. I plan to use an Ubuntu server with the LEMP stack on the VPS, should I just use Wordpress? I am definitely not experienced in website building so it's not realistic to do my own HTTP. My only concern is using Wordpress will result in a poorly optimized site that may strain my limited resources, but there are also a few people in our org that have experience with it so that would help.

While I have a decent amount of tech experience generally, these are mostly uncharted waters for me. I know this comes across as kind of half baked, but really I am just looking for general advice!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

porkbun is another domain name purchasing service you can look at. And cloud providers (like Alibaba Cloud) often have their own as well (of course you can't get any domain through any service).

There are ways to host a simple static website basically for free, without running a dedicated server or dealing with web server complexity, using a service like Codeberg Pages (https://docs.codeberg.org/codeberg-pages/using-custom-domain). It's somewhat technical. You have less control over it of course, but it's probably a lot less of a maintenance burden than Wordpress or any other software that requires its own server. Not much needed to secure it. Probably a lot of peace of mind compared to have a server running 24/7 that you have to basically be on-call for.

I wonder about email hosting too. I think any third party email hosting provider is probably a rip-off because they usually charge by the user (Alibaba Mail is $4 per user). So if you have two users that's going to cost twice as much as a single user, even if the second user doesn't get used much. Maybe worth it if you only need a couple email address. But if you end up growing then you'll have to pay a lot more.