Web Development with Node and Express, 2nd Edition

Chapter 21. Going Live

The big day is here: you’ve spent weeks or months toiling over your labor of love, and now your website or service is ready to launch. It’s not as easy as just “flipping a switch” and then your website is live…or is it?

In this chapter (which you should really read weeks before launch, not the day of!), you’ll learn about some of the domain registration and hosting services available to you, techniques for moving from a staging environment to production, deployment techniques, and things to consider when picking production services.

Domain Registration and Hosting

People are often confused about the difference between domain registration and hosting. If you’re reading this book, you probably aren’t, but I bet you know people who are, like your clients or your manager.

Every website and service on the internet can be identified by an Internet Protocol (IP) address (or more than one). These numbers are not particularly friendly to humans (and that situation will only get worse as IPv6 adoption improves), but your computer ultimately needs these numbers to show you a web page. That’s where domain names come in. They map a human-friendly name (like google.com) with an IP address (74.125.239.13 or 2601:1c2:1902:5b38:c256:27ff:fe70:47d1).

A real-world analogy would be the difference between a business name and a physical address. A domain name is like your business name (Apple), and an IP address is like your physical address (One Apple Park Way, Cupertino, CA ...