As a developer, I always felt like I needed to keep growing — try new things, learn new tech, stop standing still. And then I noticed a few friends had their own portfolio websites, the kind that make you go "wait, I want one of those too." So I did what any self-respecting beginner does: I opened Google and typed something like "how to build a website."

My first genuine question was, and I'm not even joking, whether I needed some kind of government permission to put a website online. That's how green I was. Turns out, no. You just need a domain and hosting, and you can build the whole thing yourself. No paperwork, no office visit, nobody stamping anything.

The only domain and hosting provider I knew back then was Hostinger, so that's where I checked prices. My domain was listed at around ₹499. Not bad, I thought. Then I checked hosting and it was showing something like ₹2,569, and as an actual broke beginner, that number made me close the tab and quietly give up on the whole idea.

Enter Anuj, my neighbour

A few days later, my neighbour and I got into a random chit-chat. Turns out he wanted to start his own personal blog and asked me for some tips, since I "knew computers." I told him about Hostinger, and unlike me, money wasn't really a blocker for him — he's older, earning a lot more, basically a big brother figure to me. So he went ahead and bought the domain and hosting. His plan even came with 100 free domains bundled in.

Naturally, I asked if I could park my own domain under his hosting account too. He said sure. And that's genuinely how my website got its start — riding on my neighbour's hosting plan.

The WordPress phase

At that point I already knew PHP and WordPress reasonably well, on top of the usual HTML, CSS, and JS. So WordPress felt like the obvious choice, and I started building. I got a homepage together, but I hated how slow it felt to load. Did some digging and realized this is just kind of how WordPress behaves once you pile enough on top of it.

Then it hit me: my site was never going to have dynamic data. It's a portfolio. Just information about me. So why was I dragging around an entire CMS for that? I looked into other options, but the only thing I actually knew was PHP-based WordPress, so I felt stuck. And I really didn't want to pay someone else to build my own personal portfolio for me — that felt backwards.

Eventually I thought, "wait, I know how to code. I can just build this in plain HTML." If I ever need to change something, I can go straight into the code and do it myself. So that's what I did — ripped out WordPress and rebuilt it as a static HTML site (yes, live, while people could technically visit it. Not that it mattered. Nobody was checking uptime on my baby portfolio and roasting me on Reddit about it. Probably.)

Building it felt like a slow, stop-start kind of game. Pause, resume, pause again. Some days I genuinely felt like I was wasting time I could've spent watching a show instead. But looking back now, I can say with a straight face: yeah, that was the right call.

Then hosting got expensive

Then came the next problem. Anuj told me Hostinger was more than doubling the renewal price for the next year — something like ₹6,450. That was enough for him to lose interest in blogging altogether and just focus on his actual work.

Which left me thinking about myself. By then I'd also built a small app and stuck its backend in an /api/ folder on that same website. With the hosting going away, none of that was going to work anymore. So I started panicking a little and searching for alternatives.

The free hosting detour

That's when I discovered InfinityFree could host my site for free. I was genuinely amazed — my first real find of a decent free hosting provider. I moved my files over, tweaked a few settings, and got it running. But the static site was noticeably slow even there, and worse, the API endpoint I was relying on straight up stopped working, because InfinityFree blocks outbound API requests on the free tier. Free, yes. But with limits I didn't love.

And then, Cloudflare

So I went looking again, and found what I can only call the actual saviour of this whole story: Cloudflare. I started digging into it and realized it could host my site with no PHP involved — using Workers for backend logic, D1 for a database, and Workers again to tie it all together. On top of that, I could connect it directly to my GitHub repo.

After a good bit of research, I figured out the right setup, stripped out every last PHP remnant from the codebase, and moved everything over. Honestly, it was a genuinely fun journey getting the site properly hosted on Cloudflare. And I'm still on it, still discovering more — turns out I can even set up a professional email through them, all under the free plan. The caching is excellent, and speed was the whole reason I picked Cloudflare in the first place. Whoever built this thing, hats off. Seriously.

And that's my journey. Domain drama, a generous neighbour, a WordPress phase, a free-hosting detour, and finally landing somewhere that just works.

Even with talent, you can't do everything on your own — but with the right amount of money and patience, there's not much you can't eventually figure out.

Thanks for reading. Kind of a mess of a journey, but it's mine.