As an avid internet user since my childhood, I've always strived to use every service for free because I am thrifty (poor) and afraid of being scammed by unscrupulous con artists. Look, there is a premium PDF editor that has so many fantastic features! Skip, I'll use ilovepdf.com. Wow, Netflix offers a plethora of massive titles with just an exorbitant amount of subscription fees, what a deal! Skip, I'll resort to the free www.[REDACTED].com instead. The only time that I spend money on the internet is for YouTube Premium and Genshin Impact (I'm embarrassed, let's not talk about that).

Domain name is also one of those free things that I would ought for. I'll use any domain for my websites even if it is a subdomain that consists of a series of randomly generated strings that are incomprehensible for humans, to say the least. For example, I would use the default, non-sensical subdomain "book-dun-three.vercel.app" that is generated by Vercel to point to my technical blog, and was status quoed for a very long time.

Besides the unwillingness to pay a single penny for the domain, I've always had the notion that setting up a domain for a website requires PhD in System Administrator and a Master's Degree in Network Engineering to properly wire everything up. Although I've had some experience in dealing with domains in my previous freelance job, I am still not entirely sure how they work under the hood.

It was not until today, I had a sudden revelation to buy myself a domain name for god-knows-what reason. The impulse was so great that I headed over to "exabytes.my", the same provider that I used for my freelance job, grabbed the domain that I yearned for and did not hesitate at all while making the payment. Very soon after, the impulse and excitement relapsed into guilt and anxiety. "Did I make the right choice?", "What do I do now?" are some of the questions I asked myself as I was left with no further instructions on how to proceed from here. The "No SSL detected" warning only aggravated my agitation as I thought that I might need to fork out a handsome amount just for that separately.

Out of desperation, I emailed the support team from Exabytes demanding them to respond to my dilemma on why I don't have SSL, where can I configure SSL and how to create subdomains. Obviously, I am not receiving any replies from them because it's eleven o'clock at night now.

Thankfully, after some petty attempts to search the internet for the next steps, I was able to land on this YouTube guide on how to add domain names to a Vercel project, which is my current hosting provider. Alas, I was able to navigate myself to complete the domain installation to my existing websites! I was on cloud nine and went to share with my sister right away. It turns out that I only need to do the following.

1. Add my newly bought domain to my Vercel project

2. Create a DNS Zone on Exabytes

3. Add the "record" details as prompted by Vercel to the DNS Zone and voilà, mumk.dev is now live!

It is magical and exhilarating to know that Vercel installs SSL for my domain automatically and for free! I even managed to add subdomains to my other websites within minutes. Now, I have "book.mumk.dev" that points to my technical blog and "blog.mumk.dev" that redirects here. I would like to applaud for Vercel's seamless integration with the domain name and I really appreciate that.

After all this hassle, I learned that SSL only needs to be configured by the hosting provider and the steps to connect to an existing website aren't as intimidating or complex as I previously thought. The only things that I will need to figure out are what are nameservers, what are registrars, how the DNS works and lastly, apologise to Exabytes support for my silly email tomorrow.