Hosting with GitHub and Managing Domains: A Guide

GitHub provides three primary types of web hosting: personal pages, organization pages, and project pages. While there are private pages available too, that’s a topic for another day. In this post, we’ll dive into how these pages work and how I manage my domains using Cloudflare.

1. GitHub Organization Page

You can have one personal or organization page per GitHub account and multiple project pages. My GitHub organization page is hosted at TechSnazzy.github.io, serving as a primary landing page for my TechSnazzy business.

2. GitHub Project Page

Project pages, on the other hand, host individual projects or blogs. My blog, for instance, is a project page hosted at TechSnazzy.github.io/sean-blog. In the future, I plan to move away from the default GitHub Pages domain name and use my custom domain.

Domain Registration and Management

After initially registering my domain with Google Domains, I moved to another provider due to Google’s decision to discontinue domain registration services. Here’s a quick look at my domains:

• https://techsnazzy.com: My main business domain, pointing to my GitHub organization page.
• https://seanmorrison.dev and https://seanmorrison.cloud: These playful domains were registered during different stages of learning and creativity. They both point to my blog.

DNS Configuration

While I’ll leave the in-depth DNS configuration for another post, let’s take a quick look at how I point my .dev and .cloud domains to my blog (project page).

I manage my DNS through Cloudflare, a robust and free solution for my needs. For example:

• My techsnazzy.com site is configured to direct to my GitHub organization page, integrated with Microsoft 365.
• The .dev and .cloud domains direct to my blog, and here’s how I set that up:

Steps to Point Domains to Blog

1. Namecheap Configuration
   • Navigate to the domain list.
   • Locate seanmorrison.cloud domain and click manage.
   • Go to Name servers, choose “Custom DNS.”
   • Enter aragorn.ns.cloudflare.com and rita.ns.cloudflare.com as the name servers and save.
2. Cloudflare Configuration
   • Navigate to the DNS tab.
   • Add an A record with the placeholder IP address 192.0.2.1.
   • Head over to the Rules tab.
   • Create a new rule with the URL seanmorrison.cloud/*, set it as a Forwarding URL with a 301 Permanent Redirect Status, and set the destination URL as https://www.techsnazzy.com/sean-blog.

Voila! This tells Namecheap about Cloudflare, and then Cloudflare redirects any traffic going to seanmorrison.cloud to my blog. It’s simple, efficient, and opens the door to countless possibilities in web hosting and domain management.