Over dinner with Nishka, we were trying to deploy a website. The challenge was: How can we deploy this website, just on mobile, without getting up from the dinner table?
STEP 1: Hosting. On my phone, I dictated to ChatGPT (whose transcription is excellent), copy-pasted that to Gemini (which is faster):
I want to publish specifically a static HTML web page on my own domain.
I want the easiest way that I can host it, preferably just by copy-pasting from my mobile without needing to muck around with Git and the likes of it.
What are the most robust, reliable hosting providers that I could use? I can sort out the domain name myself as long as they support an option to map a custom domain name to them.
Ideally, I am looking for something that is free, preferably free forever.
Top answer: GitHub Pages.
Since Nikki already had a GitHub account, that worked well. Using GitHub Mobile, she created a new repository, created a new index.html, and published it to GitHub Pages - all from the phone, without needing to get up from the dinner table. (The content was vibe-coded later, but the infrastructure was set up during dinner.)
STEP 2: Domain Name. Next question - again, to Gemini via ChatGPT dictation:
Okay, I want to buy a domain name next. What’s the cleanest simplest cheap way that I can get a domain?
For now I’m not particular about which domain but I should be able to buy this very easily just on a mobile and I should be able to configure the DNS directly on the mobile itself.
Top answer: Cloudflare Registrar.
Nikki didn’t have a Cloudflare account, but was able to sign up for one easily on the phone.
After searching for a bit, rexgattu.com (the future home page for the youngest member of the family) was available for ~$10/year.
Her sister’s credit card photos were available on her phone, so there was no need to get up from the dinner table to get the card details.
STEP 3: Setting up DNS. The third question was:
How do I point a domain name that I purchased on Cloudflare and his managed by Cloudflare to a GitHub Pages page?
It provided step-by-step instructions: Go to DNS > Records. Add an A record pointing @ to 185.199.108.153. Add a CNAME record pointing www to [username].github.io.
She did that. Now www.rexgattu.com pointed to the GitHub Pages site.
That’s it! Our infrastructure has gone to the point where we can deploy a website on a custom domain, without even needing to get up from the table.