What is it?
Hosting is renting a computer to serve your code to the internet. There are three flavors that matter for frontend work today: static (files on a CDN), dynamic (a server runs code per request), and edge (small functions running close to users worldwide). Pick wrong and you'll fight your tools.
Why it matters
The hosting choice shapes everything: how fast users see content, how you handle data, how much you pay, how on-call feels. Understanding the trade-offs early saves you from a "we shouldn't have built it that way" rewrite six months in.
What to learn
- Static hosting: GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages
- Dynamic hosting: traditional servers (Render, Fly, Railway, Heroku)
- Edge hosting: where functions run, why it's different
- CDNs: caching at the edge, cache invalidation reality
- HTTPS certificates: how Let's Encrypt + your host issue them
- Environment variables and how they cross the deploy boundary
Common pitfall
Treating "deploy" as a final step instead of a daily one. Hosts that need manual deploys reward batch work; hosts with preview deploys reward small PRs and tighter feedback. The deploy ergonomics shape your team's velocity more than the framework choice does.
Resources
Primary (free):
- MDN — Publishing your website · docs
- Vercel — Static vs dynamic · docs
- Cloudflare — Edge computing explained · article
Practice
Take any HTML file you've written, push it to a GitHub repo, and deploy it on two different hosts (e.g. Vercel and Cloudflare Pages). Time how long each took from "git push" to "live URL." Done when both are public and you can describe the meaningful difference between the two flows.
Outcomes
- Pick the right hosting model for a given app (static vs dynamic vs edge).
- Deploy a static site on at least one host without a tutorial open.
- Explain why a CDN makes a page faster in plain English.
- Set environment variables securely on a real hosting provider.