Domains, Hosting, and Deployment

Most clients you work with won't understand domains, hosting, or deployment, which means you need to understand it well enough to explain it simply and handle it confidently on their behalf — this is often a real point of trust-building, since a client watching you navigate this smoothly reinforces that they made the right choice hiring you.

At a basic level: a domain (like examplebusiness.com) is the address people type to find the site, and hosting is the service that actually serves the site's files to visitors. Modern deployment platforms (like Vercel, which much of this curriculum's own tooling is built on) make this process dramatically simpler than it used to be — connecting a project to a domain and getting it live is often a matter of minutes, not a complex server setup.

A clean handoff process matters as much as the technical steps: confirm who will own the domain (generally, the client should own their own domain, even if you help them purchase and configure it, to avoid holding something essential to their business hostage to your relationship), document login credentials clearly for the client's own records, and walk them through, in plain language, what you did and how the pieces fit together.