This category opened with a single question a student asks after finishing a course here: how do you actually make a site live? Forty lessons later, here is the shape of the full answer, and where to go from it.
| Piece | What it does |
|---|---|
| Domain | A human-readable name for a site, registered through a registrar, renewed on a schedule |
| DNS | The system that points a domain at wherever the site actually lives |
| Hosting | The computer, of whatever type fits the project, actually running the site |
| A separate service, connected to the domain via its own record type, entirely independent of hosting | |
| HTTPS | Encryption and identity verification, now essentially free and mandatory |
| CDN / edge | Optional infrastructure that puts a site's content physically closer to visitors |
This category assumed a finished project from one of the course tracks — HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, WordPress, React, or Node.js — and covered getting it live. The Career Skills category, which this category exists specifically to support, covers what comes after: turning a live, deployed project into proof of work for a job search. A finished project that only exists on a local machine cannot do that job — this category is what closes that specific gap.
Start with the basics — the rest is here when you need it
Not every project needs everything in this category on day one. A first portfolio piece genuinely only needs static hosting, a working domain, and HTTPS — the deeper lessons on VPS servers, CDNs, and multi-environment staging are for when a project grows into needing them, not a checklist to complete before a first site is allowed to go live.