Managed Hosting

Now that you have a more nuanced understanding of what it takes to host a website, we can explore options for making the process easier, and potentially more reliable. It is important to understand that few web developers actually tackle every step of the process. Instead, most turn to some form of managed hosting - allowing a business whose primary role is hosting web servers to do some of the work.

Just how much you want to do yourself, versus have a hosting company do is one of the decisions you must make. At the extreme end, you can put together your server hardware, install and configure your server software, and manage it all out of your own business or home. At the other extreme, there are companies that will provide you with a location you can upload your website files to (via secure ftp or other means), and your code will then be hosted via Apache or Nginx at a domain name you specify. Some of the most common include companies like Word Press and Squarespace. For our purposes, we are going to explore a middle-ground, or semi-managed hosting service, GitHub Pages.