ACTION
In this lesson, we will set up all the infrastructure we'll be needing to run landing pages: Get a domain, set up hosting to store the pages online, set up a CDN to serve those pages fast, and use a DNS service to direct the visitors from the domain name to the place where we host the files.
Note: We will be using Namecheap as the domain registrar, NSOne as the DNS service provider, Amazon S3 as the webhost, and Amazon Cloudfront as the CDN. If you want to substitute any of these services, please feel free to do so, but know that if you run into problems, you'll be on your own (you can still ask questions in the forum and try to get other members to help - just that I may not be able to help you because I'm weak when it comes to tech).
Another Note: I choose to use NSOne because it's one of the fastest, but it's not the cheapest. If you want cheap, go with something like Route 53. In the overall scheme of things, DNS costs are relatively small. Even at a relatively expensive DNS provider like NSOne, 5 million queries will only cost $25 at the time of writing. Hopefully if you're running that amount of traffic, $25 won't be much compared to the profits you'll be making. But if you want to explore the cheaper alternative, please skip ahead to the EXPLANATION section before taking ACTION.
LET'S BEGIN!
1)Register a Domain at Namecheap
-Register an account at Namecheap.com if you don't yet have one.
-Sign in, click on "Domains" > "Domain Name Search".
-Think of a domain name for your landing pages. If you have a vertical you would like to focus on, you can come up with a domain name that is related to that vertical (e.g. for sweeps, win-an-iphone-x-today.com or a more generic one like daily-prize-rewards.com). If you haven't decided on what kind of offers to promote, then just register something generic, such as:
exclusive-offers-for-you
special-promotional-offers
extreme-deals-site
today-only-special-offers
....you get the idea. 
Enter your desired domain name into the search field and press ENTER. Domain names that have already been taken will show a "Make Offer" link and "Whois" link at the end of the row. Domain names that are available will show a price and a shopping cart icon.
And no, it doesn't have to have a .com extension. For example, .xyz, .club, and .life domains are cheaper, and would be good choices.
-Once you've decided on a domain name, click on the shopping cart icon and go through the purchase process to buy the domain.
Purchasing for 1 year would be enough (in case your domain gets banned by google and you need to register another).
Getting WhoisGuard is recommended, as many pop landers are at least somewhat scammy in nature - and the fact that WhoisGuard is free for the first year (at the time of writing) makes it a no-brainer.
No need to get Premium DNS - we'll be using NSOne, as you'll see below.
I purchased a new domain for use with this tutorial as an example - the domain name is exclusive-offers.club.
2)Set Up Hosting at Amazon S3
-Register an account at AWS if you don't yet have one: https://aws.amazon.com/
-Click on "Services", then "S3" under the "Storage" section.
-Click on "+ Create bucket".
-In the "Create bucket" window, put your domain name (minus the extension) as the "Bucket name", leave "Region" at default (location doesn't matter as we'll be using a CDN to serve pages from locations all over the world), then click "Create".
Note: It doesn't much matter what this bucket name is, as long as you remember which domain it's for. However, the name DOES need to be unique amongst all the buckets on Amazon (from all users and not just you). So, try "yourdomain" or "yourdomainfiles". For my particular domain, I named my bucket "exclusive-offers".
-Click on the bucket name you've just created. Click on "+ Create folder", type in the name "sweeps" and click "Save".
-On your desktop, open any text file editor (notepad would be fine for example), and write a line of text similar to the following, then save it as index.html:
-Back in Amazon S3. Click on "sweeps", then click "Upload", and drag the index.html you've just made, to the popup window, then click "Upload".
-Back in the screen showing the "sweeps" folder, click on "+ Create folder", type in the name "iphone7" and click "Save".
-Then click on "iphone7", click on "+ Create folder", type in the name "en" and click "Save".
-Download the sample landing page below - you can choose from .zip or .7z depending on which compression software you use (if you don't have winzip, download 7 zip from here):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xqtw8p2sucld63i/LP1.7z?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nqng0xai3vihznn/LP1.zip?dl=0
Unzip the downloaded file.
-Back in Amazon S3, click on the "en" folder, then click on "Upload", then drag the unzipped LP1 folder to the popup window, and click "Upload".
-Right now, visitors can't access this landing page. We need to grant permission in order for visitors to see it. Caurmen has shown us how to let visitors see ALL the pages in our bucket folder, by granting permission on the bucket level.
First, find the folder path at the top of the page that looks something like this:
Next, paste the following code into the textbox, changing "MYBUCKET" in the code to the name of your S3 Bucket (don't forget this step):
{
"Version":"2012-10-17",
"Statement":[{
"Sid":"PublicReadGetObject",
"Effect":"Allow",
"Principal": "*",
"Action":["s3:GetObject"],
"Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::MYBUCKET/*"
]
}
]
}
-Go back to the "Overview" tab, and click into "sweeps" > "iphone7" > "en" > "LP1", and click on the "index.html" file. Then right-click on the link in the "Link" section at the bottom and choose "Open link in new tab" (or if you're not using the chrome browser, do whatever you need to do to open that link in a new browser tab).
You should now see the landing page with the title "Looking for iPhone 7 Testers". If you do, it means the landing page is now accessible. Browsing to the landing page to make sure it is accessible, would always be a good check for every lander you upload in the future.
3)Set Up CDN at Amazon Cloudfront
-In your Amazon AWS account, click on "Services" at the top, then go to "CloudFront" under "Networking & Content Delivery".
-Click the "Create Distribution" button.
-For "Select a delivery method for your content", we want to choose Web, so click on the "Get Started" button in the "Web" section.
-You'll be in the "Create Distribution" screen. Click in the "Origin Domain Name" field and choose the S3 Bucket you've created above.
-Scroll to the "Distribution Settings" section, and type in there the "www" of your domain name, without "http://":
-For "Default Root Object" enter "index.html".
-Then scroll to the bottom and click "Create Distribution".
You'll then see a screen like this:
(The "In Progress" will change to "Deployed" in around 15 minutes - no need to wait for this to happen before continuing with the next step.)
Copy the link in the "Domain Name" column and save it somewhere - we'll be needing it in the next step.
4)Set Up DNS at NSOne
-Register for an account at https://ns1.com. This is not a free service but you'll only get charged if you go over 500k impressions/month. For up-to-date costs see https://ns1.com/pricing#managed. This is one of the fastest DNS services available, and to me the extra little bit of cost is justified. You'll need to enter a valid credit card number to complete account registration.
As was mentioned before, if you want a cheaper alternative, check out the EXPLANATION section part of this lesson.
-Once you're all registered, click on "ZONES" at the top > "Add Zone". In the new window, paste your new domain into the "Domain (required)" field, then click the "Add Zone" button at the bottom.
-You should then be looking at all the information associated with your new domain. Click on the "Nameservers" tab, and you should see 4 nameservers:
-Go back to your Namecheap account, log in, go to "Domain List". Find your new domain and click on the "Manage" button for this domain.
In the next screen, find the "NAMESERVERS" section, click on the field (should be "Namecheap BasicDNS" by default) and select "Custom DNS".
-Click "+ ADD NAMESERVER" twice so you'll have 4 empty lines. Then copy over the 4 nameservers you saw in your NS1 account. Click the little green arrow to save.
-Back in your NS1 window. Click into your new zone if you're not already there. Click on the "Add Record" button. Change the dropdown to ALIAS, then paste the Amazon Cloudfront domain name to the "Answers" field. Click "Save All Changes".
-Click on the "Add Record" again. Change the dropdown to CNAME, put "www" in front of the domain name, then paste the Amazon Cloudfront domain name to the "Answers" field. Click "Save All Changes".
Lastly, you'll likely need to wait for up to 24 hours for DNS to propagate. How do you know whether DNS has finished propagating? Simply browse to the sample landing page via your real domain, to see whether you can see the landing page. So, browse to:
http://your-domain-name.whatever/swe...LP1/index.html
In my particular case I would browse to:
http://exclusive-offers.club/sweeps/...LP1/index.html
If you can see your landing page, then you're all set!
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EXPLANATION
As a non-geek that only knows just enough technical stuff to get by, I'm really in no position to explain how any of this works. However, I will briefly describe, in my rudimentary way, how the 4 components we've set up, work together to serve our landing pages. You can always learn more about this topic by googling.
Also, as was promised above, I will point you to a cheaper DNS alternative than NSOne.
1)How the Domain, Amazon S3, Amazon Cloudfront, and NSOne work together.
First of all, in order for files to be accessible on the internet, they must be hosted (stored) online somewhere.
Amazon S3 is such type of storage space. So we upload our landers to it to be stored online and accessed by our visitors.
Now - these landers are actually stored in a server which is located at a single physical location. Remember how S3 allowed for us to select a "Region"? That would be the location the pages would be served from.
Trouble is, because we'll probably be promoting offers from all over the world, some of those target geos may be very far from the server location - and the further the visitor is from the server, the longer they'll have to wait for the landing page to load.
One of the best ways to make landers load faster, would be to use a CDN service. What it does is it will send copies of the lander to multiple server locations around the world, so that when a visitor tries to access your lander, the CDN will serve the page from the server nearest that visitor. This is where Amazon Cloudfront comes in - it's a CDN service that will grab the files you upload to S3 and distribute them to multiple servers around the world.
Next, remember what the S3 and Cloudfront links looked like? They look something like the following...
Sample S3 link: https://s3.amazonaws.com/exclusive-o...LP1/index.html
Sample Cloudfront link: http://d1fate3ml5aa81.cloudfront.net...LP1/index.html
You'll probably admit that these links don't look very relevant to the offers we're wanting to run, so may cause some confusion for our visitors. This was why we needed to register a relevant Domain Name.
Lastly, we need something that will link the domain name to the files on the CDN. This is the purpose of NSOne.
Remember that in the domain settings on Namecheap, we specified the nameservers as the ones we got from NSOne? This way, when a visitor tries to access the domain name in the browser, they will be redirected based on the "rules" we set at NSOne.
On NSOne we've set up the following rules, or records:
1)An ALIAS record for the domain, that points the root domain to the CDN domain (e.g. d1fate3ml5aa81.cloudfront.net). So if anyone tries to browse to for example:
http://exclusive-offers.club/sweeps/...LP1/index.html
NSOne would know to direct them to:
http://d1fate3ml5aa81.cloudfront.net...LP1/index.html
2)A CNAME record that points the www. version of our domain name (e.g. www.exclusive-offers.club) to the CDN domain (e.g. d1fate3ml5aa81.cloudfront.net). So if anyone tries to browse to for example:
http://www.exclusive-offers.club/swe...LP1/index.html
NSOne would know to direct them to:
http://d1fate3ml5aa81.cloudfront.net...LP1/index.html
That would be all I know and all I can tell you.
Fortunately, for our purposes, having this limited knowledge would be enough for now.2)A Cheaper DNS Solution to NSOne.
It shouldn't be difficult to replace the part about NSOne in my instructions above, with the instructions from this post on Route 53, and achieve the same thing. If you get stuck along the way, make a post to ask for help, describing your problem, and I'm sure someone will help out.
So should you go with NSOne or Route 53? NSOne is more expensive but is also faster. Is the extra speed worth the extra money? I really can't tell you, as I haven't split-tested to see the impact the faster time can have on conversion rate for example.
You can find a speed comparison chart here that includes the speeds from both of these DNS services:
https://www.dnsperf.com/
At the time of writing, NSOne is 50+ ms faster than Route 53. How much impact this will have on campaign performance is unknown.
As for the price differences, here are pricing details for NSOne:
https://ns1.com/pricing
And here are the pricing details for Route 53:
https://aws.amazon.com/route53/pricing/
Taking a sample scenario of 5 million queries a month: This would cost you $25 at NSOne, but $2 at Route 53 (at $0.40/million queries). But like I've mentioned before, $25 shouldn't be a lot relative to the profits you should be making from that traffic volume.
**************************************************
READING
None for today - unless you would like to understand more on how DNS and CDN work. Just google and read.
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Well that wasn't bad at all was it? Next, we'll need to rip some landers and fix them up - get some rest until then.
Amy
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