DNS and Domain Name Transfer

Today I worked on some admin stuff for the website project I’ve been working on. I’m moving it from be registered & hosted on one domain, to being hosted & served by Netlify. I also want more the domain because it costs about 25% more on the existing service than it would elsewhere.

No More AWS

The original plan was to move the domain to AWS because I host other sites there, and I like having everything in one place. But on looking into it further, given it’s on Netlify which has its own CDN and provides free SSL on custom domains, being on AWS actually seems to mean paying for a few things Netlify is already providing for free. Even if it’s just pennies a month, why pay when it’s free elsewhere?

Or at least I’m pretty sure it is. In my mind I hadn’t separated the AWS Route 53 registrar service from its DNS service. The domain registration is roughly the same annual fee ($12) as other registrars. On top of that it’s $0.50/month for the DNS services. Plus, since AWS CloudFront is also required for SSL certificates, there are a few pennies every month for those services as well.

I came across some interesting blog posts which led me to Google Domains…it’s the same annual registration fee, private registration, and added bonus—an easy way to integrate domain-name email as well. And as far as I can tell (I’m really hoping I’m understanding correctly!?) the DNS services are included too.

So in a few days I will make the big transfer, shut down the Wordpress site, and it will be purely my own project out there in the wild. Exciting!

Other Stuff

Catching up on a bunch of podcasts, there is so much good content out there! CodeNewbie and Command Line Heroes are great, and discovered the Indie Hackers podcast today too. Looking forward to diving into that one next!

Up Next

I will be working on building an extended footer for the new site, and also adding search functionality. Glad I already figured that out for this blog 😝