nTh among all

At the University of Waterloo, we have a Final Year Design Project/Capstone project. My group is working on a conference management suite called Calligre. We’ve been approaching it as kind of a startup – we presented a pitch at a competition and won! While sorting out admin details with the judges after, they were oddly impressed that we had email forwarding for all the group members at our domain. Apparently it’s pretty unique.

In the interest of documenting everything I did both for myself, and other people to refer to, I decided to write down everything that I did.

Note that we’re students, so we get a bunch of discounts, most notably the Github Student Pack. If you’re a student, go get it.

Domain

1. Purchase a domain. NameSilo is my go-to domain purchaser because they have free WHOIS protection, and some of the cheapest prices I’ve seen.
   Alternatives to NameSilo include NameCheap and Gandi. Of the two, I prefer Gandi, since they don’t have weird fees, but Namecheap periodically has really good promos on that drop a price significantly.
2. Use a proper DNS server. Sign up for the CloudFlare free plan – not on your personal account, but a completely new one. CloudFlare doesn’t have account sharing for the free plan yet, so Kevin and I are just using LastPass to securely share the password to the account. For bonus points, hook CloudFlare up to Terraform and use Terraform to manage DNS settings.
   Alternatives include DNSimple (2 years free in the GitHub Student Pack!) and AWS Route 53.
3. Sign up for Mailgun – they allow you to send 10000 messages/month for free. However, if you sign up with a partner (eg Google), they’ll bump that limit for you. We’re sitting at 30000 emails/month, though we needed to provide a credit card to verify that we were real people.
   Follow the setup instructions to verify your domain, but also follow the instructions to recieve inbound email. This allows you to setup routes.
   Alternatives include Mailjet (25k/month through Google), and SendGrid (15k emails/month through the Github Student Pack) – though SendGrid doesn’t appear to do email forwarding, they will happily take incoming emails and post them to a webhook
4. Once you have domains verified and email setup, activate email forwarding. Mailgun calls this “Routes”. We created an address for each member of the team, as well as contact/admin aliases that forward to people as appropriate. I recommend keeping this list short – you’ll be managing it manually.

Hosting

1. We currently have a basic landing page. This is still in active development, so we use GitHub Pages in conjunction with a custom domain setup until it’s done. This will eventually be moved to S3/another static site host. For now though, it’s free.
2. Sign up for a new AWS account.
3. Register for AWS Educate using the link in the Github Student Pack. This gets you $50 worth of credit (base $35 + extra $15). Good news for uWaterloo people: I’ve asked to get uWaterloo added as a member institution to AWS Educate, so we should be getting an additional $65 of credit when that happens.
   Note that if you just need straight hosting, sign up for Digital Ocean as well – Student Pack has a code for $50/$100 of credit!

AWS

1. In AWS, create an IAM User Account for each user. I also recommend using groups to assign permissions to users, so you don’t need to duplicate permissions for every single user. I just gave everyone in our team full admin access, we’ll see if that’s still a good idea 6 months down the road…
2. Change the org alias so people don’t need to know the 12 digit account ID to login.
3. Enable IAM access to the billing information, so you don’t have to flip between the root account & your personal IAM account whenever you want to check how much you’ve spent.
4. Enable 2 factor auth on the root account at the very least. Let another person in the team add the account to their Google Authenticator/whatever, so you’re not screwed if you have your phone stolen/otherwise lose it.

More stuff as and when I think about it.