Purchase a domain

You can buy domains many places, but there is some convenience to doing it through AWS itself, which is reasonably priced:

Cheaper domains on AWS currently cost around $12/yr, but if you would like a trendier domain, you can expect to pay more. Students may be able to get a free domain through NameCheap for Education.

Set up an SSL certificate

In order to have encryption—which you want!—you need a certificate. You can get this for free through AWS, though it's particularly easy to set this up if you registered your domain through AWS as well:

1. First, make sure you are in the US-East-1 zone. (This matters.)

2. In the AWS Certificate Manager, select "Provision Certificate"

3. Request a public certificate.

4. Enter your domain preceded by an * (thus 'gameswithwords.org' would be entered as *.gameswithwords.org).

5. If you registered your domain with AWS, use DNS validation. Otherwise, follow the instructions.

6. Skip through the next couple steps, then create a CNAME record. This is simple if you used AWS for your domain registration; otherwise, follow the instructions. ​

At this point, you wait for your certificate to be issued. Depending on how you registered your domain, this may take variable amounts of time. For us, it usually only takes a few minutes.

SSL certificates set up outside of AWS vary in cost, but start around $8/year.