After a few chats with Gemini, I finally have the website up and working. I originally bought the domain on July 27 from Cloudflare for a price of about $10 USD. Not bad. Especially for a .com domain.
If it wasn’t already obvious, I know absolutely nothing about hosting or creating a website. In hindsight, it would’ve been a better idea to ask any of my more tech-savvy friends, but I digress. When I was first looking for a domain to buy, I looked through loads of websites—GoDaddy, NameCheap, Porkbun—all the big ones. I eventually landed on Cloudflare because it had about the cheapest yearly renewal rate.
I had all sorts of ideas when it came to the actual domain too. I first had a brilliant thought: alexc.ao. Unfortunately Angola was gatekeeping that one. Eritrea wasn’t letting “caoalexand.er” slide, either. This left me with no choice but to choose a more boring domain ending. “alexcao.net”, “alexcao.ca”, and “alexcao.blog” were all solid options. However, when I first saw that alex-cao.com was miraculously available, I knew the choice was obvious. Sure, the hyphen was kind of annoying, but it still has a great ring to it.
After another hour of trying to figure out what an SSL certificate is, the website is finally up. Sure, I still have some fixing to do, but this’ll be good enough for now.