From Localhost to the World
Right now, your site lives on localhost: only you can see it, and only while your laptop is running the preview.
To put it on the internet, it needs a new home: a computer that’s always on and that anyone can reach. Putting your site there is called deploying (copying your finished site onto a computer the whole internet can visit).
But what kind of home? There are three basic options. You’ll hear these words a lot, so here they are in plain terms.
Three Kinds of Home
Think of it like running a kitchen:
- On-prem (short for “on the premises”): you own the machines. Like buying your own kitchen. You buy it, set it up, repair it, and it’s yours.
- Cloud: you rent a machine from a company, and it’s always on. Like renting a kitchen by the month. No repairs, but you pay rent even when it’s quiet.
- Serverless: you don’t rent a whole machine at all. Your site wakes up only when someone visits, and you pay for what’s used. Like ordering catering only when guests arrive.
Watch what happens to each one on a day when your link suddenly gets shared:
| On-prem | Cloud | Serverless | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You | Own the machines | Rent a machine | Rent nothing |
| Busy moment | Can get overwhelmed | Can get overwhelmed | Stretches to fit |
| Quiet night | Machines sit idle | Rent still due | Costs almost nothing |
| Looking after it | All on you | Some on you | Nearly nothing |
Your Site Is the Easy Case
Remember: your site is a static site. Just files, the same for everyone.
Static sites don’t need a machine running code at all. They just need somewhere to keep the files and hand them out fast. That’s the simplest, cheapest kind of hosting there is. Usually free.
Copies All Over the World
The best static hosts don’t keep your site in just one place. They keep copies of it in cities all over the world. This is called a CDN (content delivery network: copies of your site kept close to every visitor).
So someone opening your site in Tokyo gets it from a copy in Tokyo, not from a server on the other side of the world. That’s why sites on a CDN feel so fast.
Hosts Are Interchangeable
Several companies offer exactly this kind of hosting, with free plans that are plenty for a personal site:
| Host | Known for |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | A huge worldwide network, a very generous free plan |
| Vercel | Made by the Next.js team, very polished |
| Netlify | One of the original easy hosts, beginner friendly |
| GitHub Pages | Built right into GitHub, very simple |
Remember the lesson from the very start: they all do the same job. You don’t need to learn them all.
We’ll use Cloudflare Pages. Its free plan is generous, its network of copies is enormous, and it connects straight to your GitHub repo. That’s the next note.
Deploying a static site is just copying files to a network that hands them out. Pick one host, and move on.