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FreeDNS: Subdomains for your side projects, demos, aliases...

Raul Piraces Alastuey on January 06, 2019

In my daily life, besides working as a Software developer, I'm always interested into launching new personal/side-projects. I launch simple webs, t...
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René Stalder • Edited

Be aware that when using a shared domain that it can get difficult to impossible to use LetsEncrypt certificates, as they will limit the amount of certificates that can be requested by one domain. So when you use one of those shared domains with over thousands of users, you'll most certainly never host on HTTPS with LetsEncrypt.

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Martin Beierling-Mutz • Edited

True. I'd recommend using free services like GitHub Pages or Netlify to host using SSL with these subdomains. That only works for static sites though, of course.

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Raul Piraces Alastuey

Good point. That's very important...

Thank you for the information.

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Josh Hadik • Edited

Personally I just went ahead and bought my own 'side-projects' domain for like $15 on Route53 (jhadik307.com) and now any projects I build I just setup as subdomains of it (project-a.jhadik307.com / project-b.jhadik307.com.) Not sure what the limitations of this setup are but so far it's worked out well for me.

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Poulad Ashrafpour

I use freenom.com that allows registering domains up to 1 year for free.

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Raul Piraces Alastuey

Good one! I didn’t knew about it...

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Nick Janetakis • Edited

You can always use nip.io for this without having to sign up to any site or configure anything.

If your web host has an IP address of 42.42.42.42 you can get a proper hostname by going to 42.42.42.42.nip.io and if you need subdomains you would just goto example.42.42.42.42.nip.io.

You could even configure Let's Encrypt to work with it if you wanted to, but you're sharing the rate limit for everyone on nip.io.

I wrote about nip.io and other useful tools for local subdomains / etc. at nickjanetakis.com/blog/ngrok-lvhme....

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Martin Beierling-Mutz

Very cool, developer.li is a great domain for some projects :)

One alternative I know of is js.org, which is intended for JavaScript projects.

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Kona Arctic • Edited

I used to use ieserver.net (running since 2001)

Now, I just dump everything onto it's own subdomain of my blog (akona.me)