Steps And Options For Building Your Website on Handshake HNS
With great power, comes great responsibility. And BUILDING on Handshake is that responsibility.
Congrats! You’re checking this out because you’re invested in Web 3.0 and Handshake. As they say, once you own a HNS coin or a HNS TLD - you are now a Handshake director.So thank you in advance for checking out this tutorial and video on how to do that. Sitting on names to flip or cyber squat is not going to help us make a true decentralized internet.Creating, and building will.So - ready to build?!
Let’s do this. SkyInclude.com/steps is this post and will put updates and text here.First, before we get into the technical parts - if you don’t want to bother with this tutorial and want to use a service - that is exactly what SkyInclude does. Currently in closed beta, we have helped work with companies such as Johnny Wu at Namebase to make sites like the one year anniversary of Handshake which you can check out at review.handshake - using our hosted Wordpress staging environment and then deploying to a static hosting solution (of your choice) such as Amazon s3, and even Sia Skynet.
Using the SkyInclude solution, you can simply make your website in Wordpress as you are familiar with, and then once ready, have it deployed to “production” or your live server.
We’ve tried and tested many methods, and also have made handshake.mercenary in Handshake - all in efforts to spread more usage of Handshake.
So here’s the steps:
Ok - so now let us go through the steps, and also link to all the different hosting and setup tutorials we have made that are relevant.Question 1: Do You Have An Existing Site To Port?
First one is - if you have a website in “the old internet” that you want to also put into Handshake / HNS? If yes, there are a few ways to do this. One way, make a duplicate of your current site - but then you’d have 2 different sites to maintain. The other is to use a static site generator (SSG) and we’re super fans of WP2Static for Wordpress to Static. This then puts our Wordpress onto a staging site and then we deploy to both DNS (the old internet) and HNS (the new internet).
To learn how to use a static site generator and then to deploy to Amazon s3 - check out this guide here SkyInclude.com/s3/
We always recommending having backups of your site anyway, so this is a good option. As of our current understanding, you cannot have the same site hosted (or at least resolving) on both DNS and HNS. The only idea we could think of is a redirect or a secondary add-on domain in your hosting provider - but that means you’d need to choose which of the 2 it would “live” on - HNS or DNS.
Question 2: What is your Handshake Domain name (SLD vs TLD)
Most of the solutions we will discuss are for SLD (domainname.handshaketld). If you want to have it at the "root" (no SLD domain) there are some hacks, but we recommend you use a dlink or Sinpa page builderr for the TLD, and build a mutiple page website on home.yourhandshakename (for example - skyinclude/ we have a one page site on the root, and then our blogs are at setup.skyinclude and our corporate site and list of TLDs is on home.skyinclude).
If you do want to host your site on the TLD level, our "hack" is here Handshake TLD root hack.
Question 3: What Is Your Site builder?
Now, what will you use to host the site? Will you use Wordpress, for example? We have found a couple different ways to use Wordpress on Handshake Kinsta - SkyInclude.com/wordpress for video and tutorial
But recently - we are recommending Cloudways as it is more affordable and scalable in that you can have plenty of Wordpress sites on the same server at the entry level price (currently 10usd/mo) - If you plan to signup, please use our affiliate link at no extra cost to you and it will help support this channel and content here
JAMStack is another keyword, also like a Static Site Generator, not using a database on production. I’m not too technical to explain it - but the idea is that it is much less resource intensive and separates the hosting from the data. So we have used Vercel for a bunch of sites - and have a video and text guide here.
You can also keep it simple with dLinks or single page builders - we have a guide at SkyInclude.com/pagebuilder for a couple options here - which depends if your Handshake name is in Namebase or not.
Question 4: Where will you host your site?
So hosting, of course - is where your site needs to “live”.
While there are some amazing hosts we LOVE in the DNS world - such as Netlify - and we have asked them in support but they are not promising when/if they will support Handshake domains.
Basically what we have seen is some DNS settings on hosting being “less strict” than others. In Netlify for example, if we try to add setup.skyinclude as a domain, it wants to verify it with its ping service in order to allow you to add it.
That is why we are currently most excited to recommend Cloudways - as you can use Wordpress with a one button click, also use their free wordpress plugin to migrate your Wordpress site from other hosting companies, and also give you no hassle or warnings about it not being verified when they try to ping the Handshake domain.
Again, Cloudways has an affiliate program, and signing up here supports this content and channel at no additional cost to you.
Question 5: Pointing your DNS of your Handshake Domain to the Hosting
Once you have your answers to the questions above, time to point the Handshake domain name to the hosting.
If your Handshake TLD is on Namebase, they give free DNS management. If your Handshake TLD is on Bob or CLI - you need to use a name server, we have done a video on Sinpa - with his free one at SkyInclude.com/sinpa and his paid one for SLDs and more at SkyInclude.com/sinpa-boost/ so check those out.
But the format is similar - you need to get the A Record (IP) or CNAME. Sinpa currently doesn’t support those - so you cannot use Cloudways or normal hosts (as of now) but would need to use Sia Skynet only. Learn more in the guides we have made for in-depth and screensharing explanations.
In Namebase, you have the ability to point to a CName or A record in the Namebase DNS settings (scroll down past the Blockchain DNS settings).
Question 6: SSL (Let’s Dane)
Question 7: Email
We have heard of Fernando at Sinpa working on an email solution, and we also in early Feb 2021 saw Rasor/ and Neel/ have an exchange http://handshake.mercenary/viewtopic.php?p=420#p420
This is something I cannot cover today as even I do not know this one.
Question 8: Marketing / SEO
Hmm, this is my passion on the “old” internet - but on the “new internet” it is so early, I’d say getting links on other Handshake (HNS) sites is the most effective way.
You can create a free account on handshake.mercencary and introduce your website in the “Live HNS Sites: Share here” - which will help get it crawled by HNS search bots.
As for search engines, we see 1 in existence now - https://yhnsoo.com/ which was discussed on Handshake Mercenary here - http://handshake.mercenary/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=108 and another coming hopefully this month HNSsearch/ which we have read about in the forum here http://handshake.mercenary/viewtopic.php?f=17&p=431#p431
So this is why we are pushing to get more of our sites on Handshake - as first user advantage on this new internet is definitely real!
Question 9: Maintaining!
Take Action!
We hope this helped - you can share this, subscribe, and more importantly - TAKE ACTION by building.
It is still super early days on web 3.0 and we are so excited to be part of the new internet. If you believe in this and want to see the value of your investment (in HNS coin or in HNS names) the best thing you can do is to build - well - probably even better is get more building too - but by you making stuff - it will get the attention and recognition we need.