I'm working on my thesis and I have to host my site and get a HTTPS certificate for it. My thesis defense is before the end of the month and after that I can basically stop hosting it because it wouldn't be needed anymore. There will be no traffic or real users. I'm not using a framework either.

Since I need it for such a short amount of time I thought it would be wasteful to spend money. I've been looking for options but from what I've read most are sketchy, don't support PHP, don't support PHPmailer, or you have to purchase the certificate separately anyways.

Does anyone have any recommendations? I've never hosted a site before since we've always relied on XAMPP

ok so, im juggling a couple tiny projects and buying domains is the least fun part now. I grab stuff on the cheap from random registrars but every time I end up manually wiring dns, ssl, pointing it to my little shared hosting or some cheap vps and it just feels like extra work for a $10 name.

Anyone here found a registrar or combo that is both actually affordable and does decent automated setup eg dns, ssl, basic landing page or hookup to github pages etc without it turning into some weird upsell maze? would love any tips, especially for folks running a few small sites not a big agency, thanks!

So... freelance web dev here and I just realized how sketchy some of the cheap domains I used are when it comes to privacy. One client is about to take cards on their site and now they are asking about pci and who can see their info in whois.

If you do client work, do you stick to the cheap domain registrars with privacy toggles or pay more for ones that have whois privacy on by default plus dnssec plus sane dns tools. Trying not to move every domain at once but lowkey worried rn... .