In this post, I want to make notes about how have we setup the ESGB website. This article might be helpful for future ESGB admins to get the insights about the ESGB website and this article might need updates as admins update the website.
A common scenario to host any website, we need a web server and domain name for the server. The first step is to obtain a domain name for your site and you can buy Domain name from a domain name provider such as Godaddy. After you have your domain name, next job is to setup a webserver(hosting service) for uploading your website and for that we do have some of the free webservers (such as 000webhost, heroku, openshift). Create a free account on those platforms and you get a free web hosting for your site. Now, we have our domain name plus our webserver, and now we should redirect users ( those visiting our domain name through a browser ) to our webserver. For that, we should setup the DNS record for the domain name. Most domain name providers provide a webportal to for adding DNS record. Once DNS setup is done you should be able to just type your domain name into a browser and get to the website hosted on your webserver.
In our case in ESGB website, we have our domain name (esgb.edu.np) provided by our domain name provider Mercantile Communications Pvt. Ltd. The DNS record on the Mercantile points to a secondary DNS server afraid.org. Afraid provides free DNS service for any registered users. The main purpose of having a secondary DNS server, and not directly pointing to our webserver, is to able to point various subdomain to different servers. We have a bunch of DNS records on our afraid account which routes various subdomains of our website to different locations. We have CNAME record for our blog.esgb.edu.np pointed to blogger and future admins can add more DNS records through the afraid portal. The main domain (esgb.edu.np) is pointed to 000webhost webserver which hosts our php based code.
I think this is it. Not sure whether all of the doubts are clear but feel free to ask questions at afahocci@gmail.com . I will try to answer your query as much as possible. Thank you for your patience :)
