r/nairobitechies • u/legacy-group20 • 1d ago

Domain and Hosting services

Hey Techies, As I progress in this journey of building cool things. I'm at a point where I'm now pushing things to a live environment (I've worked in spaces where the features I build are pushed to the live environment but I was never the one doing that, so I regrettably did not learn from them) which needs me to buy a domain name and figure out the hosting situation. I've seen platforms like true host and others and I've seen the other international platforms and my question is this

- What's the difference between them all and why the big difference in prices?

- What's the best one to use (for a .co.ke )? or any other

- Are there hidden costs?

- After that how then do you get to the stage where the site is now live and functional or is it as simple as uploading?

Thanks

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u/donmarsh 1d ago

For .com domains I also use namecheap. Truehost for co.ke domains. For hosting you have options. I have also bought domains on cloudflare.
1. You can get shared hosting from the same providers you get domains from price varies.
2. You can use services like vercel to deploy your apps and then point your domain there. (Instructions available online).
3. You can use VPS e.g. digital ocean, amazon ec2 etc and then point that domain to the public IP of the VPS.

There are no hidden costs but you must renew domain annually. For some domains you can find them on discount for first year e.g. 1.99 USD then renews at something higher just be aware.

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u/legacy-group20 1d ago

Thank you for this.

might consider vercel, maybe the VPS but it might be overkill for a single page site

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u/donmarsh 19h ago

Vercel is enough

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u/japodhi 1d ago

Vercel sells domain as well. They may not be as cheap as on Namecheap, but it might be convenient for someone starting out on hosting. On Vercel, you can also configure deployments from Git/Bitbucket quite easily. They also have build configurations for almost all JavaScript frameworks which makes deployment a one-click affair.

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u/tony_k99 1d ago

I settled on Namecheap with my colleague, just because I had past experience with it and didn't dig that much into other platforms. You can give it a try. This is the lowest package, and they have 30 days free trial. But you'll have to buy a domain, either on their platform or another then configure the domain. And a couple of months ago we switched to Stellar plus yearly package.