How a website gets online

You’ve got the whole picture now except the last step. How does a site on your computer become a site everyone can see?

Copy the files to a host

Remember part 1. A host is a computer that never turns off. Putting your site online means copying your finished files to it. People call that deploying. It’s just a fancy word for “copy it there”.

The simplest way: build your site, then drag the dist folder onto a web page at a host. Thirty seconds later, you have an address you can send to anyone. Lesson 7 of the course does exactly this.

What it costs

For a site like yours, often nothing. Several good hosts have free plans. We compare them on our free hosting page. We host this site on one of them.

You pay for two things, if you want them:

• Your own address, like yourname.com. About the price of a pizza each year.
• A bigger host, only if your site gets very busy. Most never need it.

Your own address

A domain name is rented from a company called a registrar. Then you tell it where your host is. Every host has a page for this, and it takes a few minutes.

You don’t need one to start. Your host’s free address works fine while you learn.

The lock in the browser

You’ll see a small padlock next to your address. It means the connection is private. Hosts set this up for you now, for free. You don’t have to do anything.

Updating your site later

Change a file, build again, copy again. Or connect your host to a service called GitHub, and it copies the new version itself every time you save there. That’s a later step. The course shows the simple way first.

That’s the whole picture

Files on a host. A browser fetches them. Astro makes the files. You copy them up. Now you know how every website works, and how yours will.