Ship Your Own Site: Domain, Hosting, Deploy

⚠️ Version note. Hosting dashboards and deploy buttons change often. The model — push to Git, a host builds and serves it, optionally point a domain — is stable across every provider. Last checked: 25 July 2026.

What you'll have at the end

• The mental model of what "deploying" actually is (files → a server → a URL)
• One real website live on the internet, deployed from a Git repo
• The know-how to attach a custom domain, and why HTTPS matters

Prerequisite

• TC-09 — Your First Page With HTML and CSS (you need a page to ship).
• TC-06 — Git and GitHub (modern deploys run from a repo).

"It works on my computer" isn't a website

A page open on your machine is a file only you can see. A website is that file served by a computer that's always on, reachable at a public URL. Deploying is the bridge between the two, and these days it's astonishingly easy: push your code to Git, and a host builds and serves it automatically. You'll do it in minutes.

Three words, defined once:

• Hosting — a computer (a server) that stores your files and serves them to visitors.
• Domain — the human-friendly name (yourname.com) that points at that server.
• Deploy — the act of getting your files onto the host and live.