I recently experienced a DNS outage at my hosting provider, Host Europe. Support failed to react for two days—a service level that has definitely declined over the years.
I was already dissatisfied with them because they had forced a migration of my emails to Microsoft Exchange without giving me a choice.
Looking at my current expenses, I realized there had to be a more cost-effective way to host my setup.
Previous Costs:
Web Hosting: €84
Domain: €12
Mail: €12
Due to the outage, I prioritized the DNS migration first.
I chose Cloudflare, a service I’ve used before and appreciate for its intuitive interface and generous free tier. I let Cloudflare automatically scan and import my existing DNS records before deleting them at Host Europe.
Finally, I updated the nameserver entries to point to Cloudflare to complete the transition.
My email traffic for my custom domain is now routed directly to Gmail. To handle outgoing emails, I configured Gmail to send via a custom SMTP relay. I also made sure to update my SPF and DKIM records within Cloudflare to ensure high deliverability and prevent my emails from landing in spam folders.
For my homepage, I decided to switch to GitHub Pages.
Since it's free and Git-based, it allows me to manage my website just like any other software project—no more manual FTP uploads.
Finally, regarding the domain "jens-stahl.de" itself: unfortunately, Cloudflare does not support .de domains yet.
After some research, I found netcup, which offers .de domains for only €5 per year.
This transition has reduced my total costs to just €5 annually for my custom email, web hosting, and domain management. And I am pretty confident that this modern setup is more reliable than before.
