I lot of tech entrepreneurs has a personal domain for a blog and email. I took a step further and use this for my personal projects.

In this article I share my domain okhlopkov.com DNS records and their meanings.

📝 DNS records of okhlopkov.com

I use my domain mostly to have a dedicated subdomain which points to a server or to a docker container with my pet project there. But sometimes I use it just to short some important links.

🔗 Short links

cv.okhlopkov.com – points to my CV which is made and currently hosted on Google Docs
l.okhlopkov.com – points to my Linkedin. A lot of my non-slavic friends have problems with my name and surname spelling so this short link can help them to find my page.

🐶 Pet Projects

Next.okhlopkov.com

I collect world's points-of-interest (POI) data by merging data from Instagram, Facebook and some GeoInt services like ArcGIS.

six.okhlopkov.com

I had a project which collected Instagram social graph data: which accounts are followed by celebrities from around the world.

I created an iOS app where you login with your Instagram account and then can calculate a "path" (a chain of mutual followships) to any person on Instagram. For example, I had 5 handshakes between my profile and Drake's. When I released my app it was instantly banned by App Store teams because noone allowed me to use this type of Instagram data.

For now, I use that subdomain just to connect to a database where I store other parsing results. Sometimes, it is better to store parsed data in one place on a server, but not locally: I have lost a huge amount of useful data just because I stored it in random subfolders of my ~/Documents/.

smm.okhlopkov.com

This is a e-commerce in Telegram bot which resells social promotion services with 600% profit. However, monthly profits are low because it was made to fun.

okhlopkov.com + www.okhlopkov.com

I host my personal blog there (you read it right now) which is powered by Ghost.

lf.okhlopkov.com

It is automated Instagram follow4follow community in Telegram bot. The project had 50k users several users ago and now almost no one uses it.

metabase.okhlopkov.com

Since I'm passioned about data parsing, aggregation and data-driven product analytics, I have Metabase (open source BI) which is connected to all my Postgres instances. I have several dashboards where I can quickly take a look how is it going.

That's it! But in case you have questions, read this small FAQ:

🙋 Small FAQ

Where do I usually buy domains for my projects

I use Godaddy.com but this year I found out that other websites like Google Domains or CloudFlare domains tend to be less expensive.

How do I manage my domains

I love Cloudflare that's why after I purchase a domain I immediately switch to Cloudflare nameservers.

Which cloud provider do I use for my projects

Since I'm more like a backend guy, I tend to have a dedicated webserver to host my projects. For example, if I was a frontend developer, I'd use only Vercel and Firebase as a backend most of the time.

Why do I need a subdomain for my projects

Some integrations require to have a secured https connection with your server to send webhooks to (e.g. Telegram Bot API). Once I have a sudomain attached to docker container, I can just issue a free Letsencrypt sertificate using dokku-letsencrypt plugin.

How do I deploy the code after push to Github

I use Dokku: it's like self-hosted open-source Heroku. That means you can use Github Actions to trigger a deployment flow on any commit or pull request to main branch.

The deployment is happening in almost zero-downtime mode: Dokku updates nginx config to send traffic to a new container only if it was build correctly.

If you have any questions, please reach me on Twitter: twitter.com/danokhlopkov