Education series · Week

Week 10 — Production deploy (domain, DNS, HTTPS)

Three subdomains, one domain, $15/year + $5/mo — the localhost-to-production flip in 15 minutes.

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What you'll walk away with

A scene-by-scene walkthrough of every beat in the video. Plain English. Real numbers. Real workflow.

The walkthrough

  1. Week 10 — Production deploy. Domain. DNS. HTTPS.
  2. Three subdomains. One domain. One bill: $15/year + $5/month.
  3. Step one: buy the domain.
  4. $15/year. Decline every upsell. Especially 'WhoIs privacy' — Cloudflare gives that free.
  5. Step two: Cloudflare. Free plan. Forever.
  6. Cloudflare gives you two nameserver names. Copy them.
  7. Paste the nameservers at the registrar. Save.
  8. Wait 5-30 minutes. Cloudflare emails when it is live.
  9. Step three: Netlify. Connect GitHub. Pick the repo.
  10. Live in 60 seconds on a Netlify subdomain.
  11. Add the custom domain. Netlify gives you a CNAME target.
  12. Two records. CNAME @ and CNAME www. Both pointing at Netlify.
  13. Live. HTTPS. Auto-cert. Done.
  14. Step four: Fly.io for the API. One install. One launch command.
  15. fly.toml. Pin the region. Scale to zero when idle. $5 max.
  16. fly deploy. Build. Push. Healthcheck. Live.
  17. Public URL. HTTPS. Same code that ran on localhost.
  18. Add the custom subdomain to Fly. It tells you what DNS records to add.
  19. Two records. Cloudflare proxy ON for caching, OFF if Fly handles TLS.
  20. Cert issued. Subdomain live. HTTPS green.
  21. Step five: n8n on the W8 box. Add a Caddy block.
  22. Cloudflare A record. Cloud icon GRAY (DNS only) so Caddy can issue the cert.
  23. Caddy reload. Live. n8n editor loads with green padlock.
  24. Step six: email. Postmark sender domain.
  25. Four records. SPF. DKIM. Return-path. Postmark validates in 5 minutes.
  26. Validated. Email now sends from hello@yourdomain.com and lands in inbox, not spam.
  27. Step seven: receive email too. Three MX options.
  28. Inbox at your domain. Loop is closed.
  29. Cloudflare WAF. Free tier. Three rules.
  30. Verify everything from a clean terminal. Three dig commands.
  31. SSL Labs A+. Free. Confidence-builder for clients.
  32. Three cert managers. All on autopilot. You never touch them again.
  33. Three backups. Domain auto-renew. Cloudflare zone export. Git.
  34. Four bugs that bite production deploys. Save this clip.
  35. Site. API. Flows. Email. All on one domain. All on auto-pilot.
  36. Week 11: monitoring. Week 12: launching it.
  37. Cut your AI bill 90%. Founder pricing $24/mo locked for life. Code LAUNCH30.

Cut your AI bill 90%+

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← Week 9 — Using local LLMs to replace API spend Week 11 — Observability (what to monitor, what to ignore) →

— Jake Morris · Oklahoma veteran · localmodeldojo.com