[Free Hosting] x10hosting : Wordpress in 5 Minutes with Your Own Domain and SSL Auto-Renew

x10 Free hosting for the masses since 2006! In this post I summarized two different ways how you can integrate your own domain with free hosting plan in x10hosting, and how to enable SSL for your own domain which the website is hosting at x10 free plan.

Free Hosting Series:

• x10hosting : Wordpress in 5 Minutes with Your Own Domain and SSL Auto-Renew
• Create Your Own Free Website in 5 Minutes with Free Web Hosting Service Provider - Byet.host (10+ Years & 1M Clients)
• Popular Free Web Hosting Providers Review Summary
• Get Permanent Free Domain Name from EU.ORG & Integrate with Cloudflare

One thing you will need to know for x10hosting is you will need a login at https://x10hosting.com/login in 30 days  to keep you account active. Else, your account will be suspended. 

Here are 10 reasons why I choose x10hosting:

1. Free Plan with 10+ years in the market - 500M disk space initial but it can be free upgraded and bandwidth is unmetered
2. No Ad
3. Availability is higher than other free hosting plan providers and also super fast
4. 3 Email addresses and 3 domains - better than some others which does not give you emails
5. FTP works and also has easy file uploads from web
6. 2 Databases can be managed through PHPMyAdmin - 2 seems less than others, but consider the registration is pretty easy, just one email address, you can get an account. 
7. 1-Click software installation for Wordpress and other solutions
8. DirectAdmin as control panel
9. Forum, Discord, and Community support
10. SSL certificate can be auto-renewed

Domain Integration Diagrams

There are two ways you can integrate your domain with x10hosting. 

I am using EU.ORG (Domain Registrar) and Cloudflare (DNS Managing Providor) as an example. 

Different ways will cause a different way to generate your SSL certificate for your website, either you can generate certificate directly from x10hosting DirectAdmin control panel or from Cloudflare then copy into DirectAdmin control panel. 

Get an Account With Just an Email

Just an email, and no more information required. Standard process as other popular free hosting providers.

Features for x10 Free Plan

Following feature lists are from x10 website or control panel. Pretty similar feature list as others. Some even have tighter limitation than Byet or Infinity. 

Basic:

	x10 Free
Control Panel	DirectAdmin
Databases	2
Email Addresses	3
Disk Space	500MB Initial (Free Upgrades)
Domains	3
Support	Self and Community Support
Cost	Always Free

Extensive :

Control Panel Software:DirectAdminMore Information 

Storage Space:500 MB (can be increased after 7 days)

Inode (File and Folder) Count:50,000 Inodes

Max File Size:10 MB

Bandwidth:Unmetered

MySQL Databases:2

FTP Accounts:3

Domains:2

Subdomains:2

Domain Pointers:1

Email Addresses:3

Features:Softaculous auto installer, PHP version select

Cost:Free!

Steps to Create a Wordpress Site 

1 Create your first service. You will be only able to create one service.

Infinity Free services are limited to 1 per account and this account already has 1 active.

One should be enough for your small project. You always can use another email to get youself another account to play with it if needed. 

2 Hosting Control Panel

Create a new subdomain or add a new custom domain:

Add an A record from your domain registrar website (in my case, it is Cloudflare) based on the information gives on the above service page

Add new domain into your service. 

3 Dashboard

4 Install WordPress

5 Click install, in less than 10 seconds, you should be able to get your Wordpress site up and running.

Enable SSL with integrating with Cloudflare

If you are using third party company, such as Cloudflare, to manage your DNS, here are the steps you can take to enable SSL for your website.

In following steps, I am assuming your domain registrar has point your domain to cloudflare's nameservers as show below. 

1 Generate Origin Server Certificate from Cloudflare

2 Copy / Paste Key and Certificate into x10Hosting's DirectAdmin SSL Page

3 Enable Full SSL/TLS encryption mode for our website.

There are two certificates used from Browser to Origin Server. First one is usually auto-generated by Cloudflare for your domain every four months which is usually issued by Google Trust Services LLC. Second one is the origin certificate we generated from Cloudflare SSL/TLS page for 15 years.

4 Https access will be automatically enabled if you enabled Force SSL with https redirect.

Enable SSL Using DirectAdmin to Manage DNS

If your domain registrar directly point the domain to x10hosting's nameservers, you can use following steps to activate SSL on your website.

1 Depending on your domain registrar, the configuration page is different.

Here is an example for eu.org, which shows domain secnet.eu.org has pointed to x10hosting's nameservers. 

If you just changed it, it will take a couple of hours to broadcast this change to all DNS root servers. 

2 Check x10hosting's DirectAdmin's DNS Management page

By default, it will be populated with some typical A records for you already, no matter if it is used to manage your DNS records. 

3 Generate your SSL certificate for your Wordpress website

4 Https access testing. 

Subdomain with ssl

 

Creae a subdomain, such as blog.51sec.eu.org

Create cname record in Cloudflare for this subdomain

Videos

 

References