How to set up domain, email, analytics, CMS, and blog

The boring setup stuff takes a weekend if no one tells you. I’ll walk you through what I use in 10 minutes.

Domain: Cloudflare Registrar

Buy your domain through Cloudflare Registrar, not GoDaddy or Namecheap.

Cloudflare charges at cost — no markup. You also get DNS management, DDoS protection, and SSL included. Moving your domain to Cloudflare later is annoying. Just start there.

One thing to know: Cloudflare doesn’t support outbound transfers for the first 60 days. Plan accordingly.

Email: Resend + custom domain

For transactional email (signups, password resets, notifications), I use Resend. It’s built by developers, the API is clean, and the free tier covers 3,000 emails/month.

For a personal email ([email protected]), I use Cloudflare Email Routing to forward it to Gmail. Free, works instantly, no inbox to manage.

Don’t use Gmail SMTP for transactional email from your app. It will get flagged. Use Resend.

Analytics: Plausible or Umami

I don’t use Google Analytics. It’s heavy, requires cookie banners in the EU, and gives you more data than you’ll ever use.

Plausible ($9/month) or Umami (free, self-hosted) do everything you actually need — page views, bounce rate, top pages, referrers — with no cookies and a 2KB script.

I use Plausible on adijha.com. I can see what people read, where they come from, and whether traffic is growing. That’s all I need.

Blog: Astro + Markdown

adijha.com runs on Astro. I write posts as Markdown files and Astro compiles them to static HTML. No CMS, no database, no server to maintain.

It’s fast, SEO-friendly, and free to host on Cloudflare Pages. Writing a new post is just creating a .md file and pushing to GitHub.

If you’re technical and want a blog, this is the stack. It takes half a day to set up once.

CMS: when you need it

If you want a visual editor or you’re publishing with a non-technical team, look at Contentlayer (free, works with Astro) or Sanity (free tier, hosted CMS with a clean UI).

I don’t use a CMS — I write in my editor. But if you want to write posts from a browser, Sanity is the fastest path.

The cost breakdown

  • Domain: ~$10–12/year (Cloudflare Registrar)
  • Email routing: free (Cloudflare) + $0 (Resend free tier)
  • Analytics: $9/month (Plausible) or $0 (Umami self-hosted)
  • Blog hosting: free (Cloudflare Pages)

Total: under $20/month. Possibly free.

The takeaway

Cloudflare for domain, Resend for email, Plausible for analytics, Astro for blog. This stack costs almost nothing and does everything you need. Stop overthinking the tools and start publishing.

Building something? Follow me on Instagram and Twitter — I document everything.