Bootstrapping
In the spirit of walking folks through the process of starting a new business - I might as well describe the process of standing up this site itself.
Originally, I thought about creating a free website on Azure - and spinning up Ghost as the publication platform. It turns out that configuration - of loading the Ghost servers as infrastructure - has largely been deprecated in favor of paying Ghost money to simply host the website itself.
Which is an important lesson - and something I will come back to over and over again during this process: rather than building something yourself - if it costs a minimal amount of money to have someone else be on the hook for support - it is well worth it. I learned this lesson the hard way over years in IT - although I know how to make my own CAT-6 cables and can crimp them to any desired size - at a far cheaper cost than purchasing a pre-built cable - if I have a hundred cables and I made a mistake making one of them - the time spent troubleshooting is simply not worth it. It is similar to building your own computer - for those of us that grew up doing so - the first time something breaks, and you realize that you are on the hook for support - you realize purchasing a pre-built computer from Dell or HP or Microsoft is well worth the time and energy just for the support alone.
So I shelled out money for Ghost hosting.
Armed with a ghost website, I did turn next to purchasing a domain - and did so via GoDaddy - whom I've used in the past to register inexpensive domain records. In the process of signing up, I somehow clicked "free trial" however, which immediately locked me out of adjusting the DNS records to point to my new shiny Ghost website.
Fortunately, GoDaddy has excellent support - both by text and by phone - and within a few minutes I was able to get a helpdesk person to remove the free products, thus allowing me to edit the DNS manually.
Unfortunately, GoDaddy doesn't allow root domain modification - so unless I want folks to have to enter the archaic "www.aleph.business" each time - I needed to get more control - and thus had to setup a CloudFlare site. The free version was good enough to get going though - so in a few seconds, I was able to switch nameservers over.
Even just these short few minutes have demonstrated - if you're not an IT professional who has worked for decades in the industry - setting up a starter website is not an easy task. Especially if you aren't willing to pay for it! For many businesses of all sizes - a website is the first "yes, we are real" moment your customers may see. And yes, of course, I could've started out with SquareSpace - or even the basic GoDaddy website - but for those of us that want to "roll our own" it was interesting to see how much knowledge was required.
The good news? DNS is relatively static - and once these settings are locked down - the only real thing I'll have to worry about is editing posts in Ghost. Which was the point, all along.
Too many visitors? Ghost's problem. Server down? Ghost's problem. Do I need assistance? I can simply email Ghost and ask for support (I already did so and received a response in seconds - another reason I am a fan of them.) When in doubt - spending a little money to have someone support you - is always worth it.