Buying a Domain and Connecting it to Cloudflare for Use with your Home Server

hi there guys so in this video we're going to be looking at buying a domain name and then adding it to cloudflare for later use with our home server for a bunch of cool things sounds interesting then let's get started hi guys so this video is aimed at beginners and as such is the first in the series that i'll be calling beginner core topics and in this video we're going to be looking at how to buy a domain name and after we've bought it how to link it to the cloudflare service so you might be wondering you know why do you actually want to have a domain name anyway now when you buy a domain name most people think the reason you're buying it is because you want to set up a website of that domain name or maybe you just want to have email hosting at that domain name and these two reasons are probably the most common reasons that people will buy a domain name for for example john has a taxi service so he wants to buy the domain name johnstaxis.com so there he can set up his website so when someone types www.john'staxes.org it comes to a website about his business but also to be professional rather than having john's taxis at hotmail.com for his email address but having the domain name allows him to have the email address john johnstaxis.com has his email address instead so it's much more professional but i can hear some of you out there saying yeah that's all very well space invader but i don't have my own business i'm happy with my email address so why do i need a domain okay so most people who watch my videos they have an unraid server at home and when you have a home server having a domain name can be a real useful thing to have once we have our domain name we can actually access services that are running on our server such as various docker containers think of things like nexcloud plex mb all that kind of thing we can actually access them through the domain name so once we own our own domain name we can create what are known as sub domains that come off that main domain name so let's go back to our example earlier of johnstaxis.com so if he was to create some sub-domains of his domain it might be something like nextcloud.johnstaxis.com plex.johnstaxis.com and so on and so on and then by going to each of these sub domain addresses so basically just typing into his browser https colon forward slash forward slash plex.johnstaxis.com that would take him straight into his plex server and he can watch his movies through that domain name and the same applies for nextcloud.johnstack going to that address would take him into his personal next cloud server and yes this doesn't actually cost any money to do at all you only need to buy the domain name as a one-off cost which is probably around ten dollars a year to have a domain name and there's no other costs involved at all so before we actually go and buy a domain name let's look at how the domain name actually is constructed and how it works so to look at how a domain name is made up let's head across to a popular website ebay and at the top here we can see in the browser it says ebay.com now i'm going to double click on this here and we can see the whole address now which is https colon forward slash forward slash www.ebay.com so let's copy this out and take a look at how it's made up so the first thing we can see here is the https colon forward slash forward slash now this isn't a part of the domain this is just the protocol the browser is using to connect to the domain name and http is an abbreviation for hypertext transfer protocol and https is an abbreviation of hypertext transfer protocol secure and that's why here we can see that little padlock because it's a secure connection so we can disregard all of that first bit and just concentrate on the domain itself and so the domain part is the www.ebay.com now let's start on the right hand side of this with the dot com part this part is called a top level domain or a tld for short and other top level domains if we're taking ebay for an example we've got com which we're on now but we could have dot ca which is the top level domain for canada or ebay.de which is the top level domain for germany and the proper name for these is country code top domains and normally they just consist of two letters so what about dot co dot uk domain so let's take ebay dot co dot uk so the dot uk is the top level country code part and when that's put together to be dot co dot uk that dot co dot uk is called a second level domain and other examples of this are things such as dot gov dot uk which is used in the uk for government organizations and or ac dot uk which is used for academic institutions now some people might argue that the dot uk part of this domain would be the second level domain and the dot co would be the top level domain but i don't think that's right i think the top level domain is always kind of at the top so on the far right so now moving across to the left and the name the actual name part of the domain here it's ebay so that's pretty straightforward so now let's go again to the left where we have www dot well we all know that www stands for world wide web but it's also a sub domain of the main domain name and once you register a domain name you can create as many sub domains as you like so basically kind of everything that's going to be to the left of your actual name of your domain so here in this example ebay the owners of the ebay domain on the left hand side can create as many sub domains or even another sub-domain of a sub-domain to the left of the domain name so again using ebay as our example let's look at a sub-domain which ebay have so here where i've got this www dot i'm going to change this to the sub domain of community so now i've got community.ebay.co.uk and if i press enter here i am on a different part of the ebay website which is the community part of the ebay website with discussion boards groups and that kind of thing so with sub domains once we've got our domain name we can create as many as we need so that's great because we don't need to buy multiple domains for having a different name for different things and each different sub-domain we can point it to wherever we want it to go so on our home servers we might want a sub-domain to point to mb to watch movies to point to next cloud so we can run a next cloud server or we can use a sub domain to maybe point to a minecraft server that we're running and the way we point our subdomains to different places is using what's called dns records and if you've never heard of dns records before don't worry about it it's not difficult each time we set something up in future videos i'll walk you through exactly how to do it and all of our dns changes we're going to do in cloudflare because in this video we're going to link the domain that we buy to cloudflare because it makes things much easier and then in the future videos everything's going to be the same it's always going to be easy to show how to actually set things up okay so now i've explained about this structure of domain names and sort of like what they are let's go ahead and actually buy one now and i'm going to use godaddy to buy my domain name now i've got no affiliation with godaddy i just like them they're really easy to use and their domain names are quite cheap so i'm going to click on here and this website is the godaddy site for the united kingdom and if you live in another region such as the united states then when you go to the godaddy website it will be for your own region such as the godaddy.com usa site and i'm in the uk so obviously i'm going to buy my domain name on the uk site so i'm going to do a search for a domain name here so i'm going to look for a domain called yourdomain.com because that would be quite cool to use for tutorials well okay maybe not quite so cool i can't really afford three quarters of a million for that one so when you search for a domain and you can't find the domain you want because it's gone maybe you look for a com you can change the top level domain part at the end to something else so here you can see i'm searching for yourdomain.one and that's available and so that's a bit better for me it's only nine pound 52 for the first year so i'm going to click add to basket and then go to checkout now now just one thing to remember when you buy a domain name you don't need to buy any kind of hosting with godaddy nothing else all you need is just the simple domain name you don't need to spend any more money than that and you can see here it's selected for the default of two years of course you can change that to only one year if you want but i'm going to leave mine on two i think and so then i'm going to scroll down to the bottom and click on to check out for payment options we've got the choice of using a card or paypal i'm going to use paypal because it's easy i'll quickly authorize this off screen and then come back when it's done so i've completed my purchase now with paypal and if you didn't already have an account with godaddy it would have prompted you to sign up for one i already had one so it's just brought me straight into here where my account is so what you want to do once you're into your account is click onto your name at the top here and then go across to my products and then if you scroll down the page you'll come to your domain that you've just bought you can see here i've got a few other domains but the one i've just bought's at the bottom so remember earlier i was talking about dns and not to worry about that well here we have to actually click onto where it says dns here because we're going to make a little change and the dns records we're going to change is what's called the name servers and these are the name servers here but before we do that we're going to go across and set up a cloudflare account so let's open up a search engine and obviously do a search for cloudflare and then obviously just click on to where you see the cloudflare website then once here in the top right here you'll see sign up we need to click onto that and to sign up we're going to need to put in our email address and password now obviously the email address i'm putting in here it's not my real one it's just one i've made up so you just want to put in your email address there and then choose a password now make sure you choose a really strong password you wouldn't want anyone to come here and guess it i'm using my bit warden password manager to generate a password for me it's nice and strong and plus it will remember it for me afterwards now i have done a video on setting up a self-hosted bit warden so take a look at that video if that's something you're interested in setting up so once you've popped in your password and email address just click on create account and then after you've done that it will bring you here where it says to enter the name of the website you want to protect so i've just bought the domain name yourdomain.one so obviously i'm going to pop in my domain name there once you've done that click on to add site then that will take you to a page asking you to select a plan now don't worry if you scroll down you'll see the free plan here which is perfect for what we need so just select that one and click on to continue so what cloudflare does now is it searches for the existing dns records for this domain and when it's a new domain you just bought there won't be very many dns records you can see there's a few here we don't need to do anything here we just click on to continue and now here it says that we need to actually change the name servers so it gives us two different name servers to change and the first one for me here is arnold.ns.cloudflare now don't just copy mine here you also probably be different cloudflare will show you what they are so just copy what yours are and to copy just click onto the little button that says click to copy and we know it's copied properly because it says copied text to clipboard now this is where we have to go back to the godaddy website to the part we just left earlier where it said change name servers so now we're going to click on to change name servers and we'll land on this page here now it says connect my domain to a website we don't want to do that what we want to do is just go down a little bit further and click here where it says enter my own name servers and now i'm going to paste in that first one that arnold.ns.cloudflare.com so with that done i'm going to go back to the cloudflare website now so i can copy the second name server they want me to use and again i'm going to click on the button click to copy and that's done because it said copied text to clipboard so now i'm going to go back to the godaddy website and i'm going to paste in the second name server here and with that done i'm going to click on to save so after you've clicked save you'll get a warning here it warns about that if you've got a website it could make your website actually disappear now the reason that is is because name servers basically help connect the urls you're using to the actual ip address of where that url should point to so the name server points to the place where all of your dns records are actually held so just click onto yes i consent and then click continue and the name servers will be changed and then they'll be pointing towards cloudflare and so then it'll be cloudflare from this point on that actually manages all of the dns records so godaddy won't actually do anything else for your domain but you will have to come back every year or two years when it's time to renew the domain and renew it through godaddy but all of the controls for the domain will be done through cloudflare so anyway now we've actually updated the name servers let's go back across to cloudflare and scroll down now if you notice here it says registrars can take up to 24 hours to process name server updates now this is true and some registrars can be really slow but godaddy are a good registrar and they update these things really quickly i never really known it take more than about five minutes so let's check if it's been done by clicking on done check name servers that will bring us to this page we can miss everything here and just click finish later okay yeah that was super quick it says great news cloudflare's now protecting your site now if you don't see this page straight away it doesn't matter just keep refreshing it and coming back after a few minutes everything will go through and now because the domain's over with cloudflare if we want to make any dns changes we just click onto this dns button here and here we can add and edit various different dns records now we're not going to do any of that now this video is just to get us all set up and running with cloudflare and then in future videos where we're using domain names it'll be those videos that show how to make the dns changes and this video will just be referenced for people who don't know how to set up cloudflare which will then in turn make future videos and to do a domain shorter because we're not having to go through these steps in each video so if you're wondering what type of videos are coming up where we're going to be using domains well there's one that should be out pretty much the same time as this one where we're going to set up a minecraft server and then connect that minecraft server to a domain name and to do that no we're not going to be using a reverse proxy we're going to be using some dns records called srv records in order to get the minecraft server working with the domain but of course there's some videos coming up in the very near future where we'll be looking at setting up a few different reverse proxies two we're going to set up on the unraid server one a reverse proxy called schwag we'll be looking at setting that up we're also going to look at another reverse proxy called nginx proxy manager both of these reverse proxies are good and each one has its own pros and cons and for you guys out there who are running pf sensors your firewall will probably have a look at hard proxy setting that up as a reverse proxy as well so there's going to be quite a few things coming in the future but for now that brings us to the end of this video now i hope you liked it and found it useful if you did as normal please hit up that like button subscribe to the channel if you're not already a subscriber and please share this video with anyone who you think might find it useful now i want to give a really big thank you to the people who make it possible for me to make these videos all of my awesome patrons and supporters out there thank you so much for your support and if there's anyone who'd like to join these great bunch of people and support the channel then please see the links in the description below and to everyone who's still watching right at the end of this video thank you guys for watching and whatever you're up to for the rest of the day i hope it's good and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 20,639

Keywords: cloudflare, domain name, domain name free, home server, how many bitcoins are there, nextcloud unraid, space invader, space invader one, spaceinvader one, unraid, how to use cloudflare, cloudflare dns, how to setup cloudflare, cloudflare dns records, create account on cloudflare, unraid tutorial, cloudflare free, configure cloudflare

Id: y4UdsDULZDg

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/spaceinvaderone]

Starting a new series where I hope it will help people new to setting up Home Server and Unraid :)

[u/huntman29]

Dude this is the EXACT series of videos I’ve been waiting for. I finally was able to figure out buying my own domain, getting it all properly setup within cloudflare DNS, AND finally finally getting a reverse proxy to work (SWAG). It’s fucking beautiful. I love you. Don’t tell my wife.

[u/MaximumAbsorbency]

NICE thanks, I was just starting to think about doing this.

[u/SemiNormal]

Godaddy sucks, otherwise good video.

[u/dokuhebi]

Perfect opportunity to ask a question about CloudFlare.

I just recently moved, and I found out the ISP I picked up blocks incoming port 80 and 443 "for my protection". At my old place, I was hosting a cluster using traefik with a front end, and unRAID being my backend data store. Everything was working swimmingly. Now with my 443 blocked, I can't host them anymore.

Before I start doing all the work, can someone tell me if I can move my services over to something like 8443, and have my domains work to hit CloudFlare at https://example.com:443 and have that redirected to https://myhomeip:8443? How does that work with traefik taking care of my TLS certificates using LetsEncrypt?

[u/theobserver_]

Do you talk about how cloudflare blocks some TCP traffic and how to fix this?

[u/ziggie216]

Thx!! Was wondering, why not register a domain directly with cloudflare? Both registration and renew is the same price unlike most place where they would discount the new registration but usually increase price for renew

[u/SemperVeritate]

Thanks for another great guide /u/spaceinvaderone. I'm curious, what are the benefits of connecting the the domain to Cloudflare?

[u/sycotix]

Pin some of my videos too :) Nice video Spacey. Hope to work with you some day