You Finished Building. Now Where Do You Actually Host It?

Every developer hits this wall. You've written the code. It works on localhost:3000 . A friend asks to see it — and you suddenly realize you have no idea how to put it on the internet. So you open a new tab and start Googling. Thirty minutes later, you're drowning in options: Vercel, Netlify, Railway, Render, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Hostinger... and zero context for which one actually makes sense for your project. Nobody teaches this part. Tutorials take you from zero to a working app, then quietly skip the "now ship it" step. This post is the one I wish had existed when I was standing in that exact spot. Step 1: Understand what kind of project you have Before you even look at a single pricing page, you need to be honest about your stack. The hosting market has split into two very different worlds — and confusing them will cost you money or headaches. Pure frontend / static site If your project is a React app, a Vue SPA, a Next.js static export, or plain HTML/CSS/JS with no persistent ba