I have always wanted a website of my own. I never got around to doing to doing it because I thought it was a lot of work. But as it turns out, you can have your own website live in under an hour, for free, with zero technical background. I’m not exaggerating.
What you need
- A GitHub account (free)
- A domain name (₹1000/year from Namecheap, Google Domains, Cloudflare, etc.)
- An LLM you can chat with (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — any of them work)
That’s it.
The idea
So a website is basically just a folder of files. A folder on your computer is not that different compared to a website on the internet. But to get files from your computer onto the internet, you need to do three things:
-
Something to turn your writing into a website : this is called a static site generator. I use Astro, but there are dozens. It takes your text and creates corresponding HTML files that browsers can read.
-
Somewhere to serve those files from : GitHub Pages hosts them for free. Every time you update your site, it automatically rebuilds and publishes.
-
A domain name pointing to it : so people can visit
yourname.cominstead ofyourusername.github.io.
How to actually do it
Open Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini and tell it something like:
“I want to set up a personal website using Astro and GitHub Pages. I have a GitHub account and a domain from [your registrar]. Walk me through the entire setup step by step, starting from creating the repo.”
The LLM will walk you through every click, every command, every setting. When you get stuck, just paste the error message back into the chat. When you don’t understand a step, ask it to explain.
A few things you’ll need to do (the LLM will help with all of this):
- Create an Astro project and understand the file structure
- Set up a GitHub repo with the right name (
username.github.io— GitHub won’t let you use any other name for your repo) - A deploy workflow so your site auto-publishes when you push changes
- Point your domain’s DNS to GitHub Pages
- Enable free HTTPS
The whole process is a conversation. You don’t need to memorize anything — just keep the chat open and follow along.
What it costs
- Hosting: free (GitHub Pages)
- Domain: ₹800-1000/year
- SSL/HTTPS: free (GitHub provisions it automatically)
- LLM help: free tier of any model is enough
Your own corner of the internet for the price of a domain name.