How to make a website with Eleventy and NearlyFreeSpeech

2025.06.14

I’m mostly writing this to remind myself. I honestly don’t much care for NearlyFreeSpeech, as I find its copy and documentation to be terribly unclear. I can’t promise this little article of mine will be much clearer.

Eleventy is a static site generator that helps one make webpages, which one can then upload to a hosting platform like NearlyFreeSpeech via a file transfer software. This article covers:

1. Making a basic webpage with Eleventy.
2. Setting up NearlyFreeSpeech hosting with a custom third-party domain.
3. Uploading your site.

1. make a webpage with eleventy

You’ll set up a basic page you can visit locally on your computer. Later, you’ll upload it to the internet.

set up eleventy

To simplify Eleventy’s documentation in a way that makes sense to me:

• Open a terminal window on your computer.
• Enter node --version to check whether you have Node.js version 18 or newer installed.
• If you don’t, follow nodejs.org’s documentation to download it. That site has a “Copy to clipboard” button, but you’ll need to enter each non-comment line into your terminal one at a time.
• Make a folder on your computer called whatever you’d like (but use special characters at your own risk), e.g., eleventy-project.
• Change directory in your terminal to the eleventy-project folder. I do this by typing cd and then dragging the folder into the terminal window. Then hit enter. For example:

cd /Users/Documents/eleventy-project

• Enter into terminal:

npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

Eleventy should start running continuously.

make a rudimentary webpage

In the eleventy-project folder, make a plain-text Markdown file called index.md. I rather loathe Markdown, yet here I am using it.

Here’s a basic page you can put in that file:

# Hello, world.

Abolish portrait mode.

Eleventy makes (? maybe you have to make it yourself) a subfolder called _site, in which it creates the main index.html and other files that you’ll later upload to NearlyFreeSpeech.

While it’s running, Eleventy hosts the index.html file at http://localhost:8080/. Enter that into your browser’s address bar, and the browser should display your site.

When you update and save your index.md file, your site at http://localhost:8080/ should update, too.

2. set up domain and hosting

You’ll set up the place that’ll hold your site online.

• Rent a domain at some registrar. I try not to rent any domain for more than $12 a year. I used a third-party registrar, not NearlyFreeSpeech.
• Make a NearlyFreeSpeech.Net (NFSN) account. You don’t need the paid membership to use hosting.
• Add money to the account, on the order of $20.
• Make a new site. Name the site the same as your second-level domain. For example, if you rented something.com, name your NFSN site something. You do not need DNS from NFSN.

connect your third-party domain to NFSN

No amount of internet searching gave me an easy answer to this, and NFSN’s documentation sure didn’t help, so I figured it out myself by trial and retrial.

• In NFSN, go to sites, then click on the short name of your site (e.g., something).
• On the page called something Site Information, find Web Site IP Addresses. Note those two numbers (e.g., ###.##.###.## and ####:####:##:#::####).
• Go to the DNS settings of your site in your third-party domain registrar.
• Erase any A, AAAA, and CNAME records.
• Set up an A record with Host being something.com and Answer being the first IP address (e.g., ###.##.###.##).
• Set up an AAAA record with Host being something.com and Answer being the second IP address (e.g., ####:####:##:#::####).
• Set up a CNAME record with Host being www.something.com and answer being something.nfshost.com.

It’ll take a while for HTTPS rather than HTTP to be enabled (not sure who enables it). When it is enabled, a 🔐 emoji will appear next to all three Site Names & Aliases at the top of the site information page on NFSN.

3. upload your website using FTP

• Take note of the SSH/SFTP Information section of your NFSN site information page.
• Get a file transfer protocol (FTP) app. I won’t say which I use, because it isn’t accessible to screen readers.
• Connect to your NFSN site using the FTP app. For Host, use the SSH/SFTP Hostname from your NFSN site information page. For Username and Password, use the Username and Password from that page. For Port, use 22.
• Once you’re connected, your FTP app should show you a directory of files locally and files on NFSN.
• Under the public folder of your NFSN site, upload the contents of your eleventy-project > _site subfolder. Don’t upload the _site folder itself. At this point, you probably have only an index.html file.

To update files after editing them locally, just upload them to NFSN and overwrite their past versions.

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