Hosting and domains

A session with the CodeYam team, with Dani and Nadia putting the common questions to Jared. Hosting is putting a website or web app live somewhere so anybody on the internet can reach it, and most of the time that somewhere is a service rather than your own computer. A domain is the name, like google.com, that takes people to it. You can have either without the other. Hosting without a domain gets you a long, funky URL from the provider, and a domain pointing at nothing is at best a mild investment. Anyone doing something relatively professional usually buys one.

Files on your computer are only on your computer. Nobody else can see them unless you go to real effort to expose your machine to the internet, which most people don't bother with. When you run an app locally you usually see localhost in the URL, an easy alias for an address on your own machine. People do try to share localhost links, and they won't work for anybody but you, because the app is running on your computer and nowhere else.

There are plenty to pick from, including GoDaddy, Render and Vercel, and for a static site you can use GitHub Pages directly. They are all pretty good and usually similar in price, so anything that ranks well when you search for hosting providers, or that Reddit recommends, is likely a decent choice. Jared's own default is GitHub Pages for a static website and Vercel or Render for a dynamic one, which matches the usual advice to start on GitHub Pages and level up from there.

You might launch without one just to test or to show a handful of people. Once you want the general public to see it, a domain is worth having. A personal website on a free provider URL can look weird, almost like a hack, especially to non-technical visitors.

There is no purely logical answer. Aim for something catchy, short, easy to remember and tied to your brand. It used to be that you almost always wanted a .com, but most short .coms are taken now, and people happily use .ai, .co, .io, or .org for a nonprofit, because most visitors find you through search anyway. Getting something reasonable is the goal, since perfect can cost tens of thousands of dollars. It is also worth researching an unusual extension before you commit, because some networks, campuses among them, block certain extensions such as .xyz outright.

Get creative. Try a different extension, or prepend a word like try, install or use to get around a name that is already owned. Sometimes a squatter holds the name and will sell it for a price. Most companies, CodeYam included, brainstorm many, many names before landing on one they like. The perfect domain shouldn't block you from getting started, and people rarely find you by guessing your domain anyway.

You are not stuck, and moving a domain to another provider is less painful than it feels. Namecheap is a popular registrar and the one the team most often uses, and Google Domains was sold to Squarespace. Watch for a low first-year price that renews at a much higher rate, and only buy from a legitimate source, since people do try to sell domains they don't own. Competition keeps the name-brand providers fairly honest.

You never own a domain outright. You rent it for a period, from one year up to many years at once, often with a discount for buying longer. If you let it expire someone else can grab it, and big companies have had to pay a lot to buy theirs back. Registrars send plenty of reminders, so the simplest protection is to turn on automatic renewal.

A static website serves the same content to everyone with nothing pulled from a database, and it can run free on something like GitHub Pages. Even a small site with a database can often stay on free tiers. A web app of mild complexity with a database typically runs about $20 to $40 a month, and a static site that talks to a database from the browser can cost less. Static sites also cope well with sudden traffic. An unclaimed domain is usually $10 to $100 up front and $10 to $100 a year after, with a typical .com around $10 to $20 a year. Buying a name from someone else is the part that can reach thousands.

Two signals. You want to add complexity, such as a database, to a site that was hosted free, or the traffic coming through gets too large for the free tier. More often than not it comes down to how much traffic you have and how much data you store, and providers usually warn you before you tip into a paid plan.

They are much less of a worry than they used to be. The old horror stories were surprise AWS bills from a sudden surge of traffic, and providers now notify you and let you set cost controls. The other thing to watch is storage. An app where people upload photos or video can grow its storage and database costs faster than you expect. Pay attention to what your hosting and database providers tell you and you probably won't have a problem.