It’s launch day! By hook or by crook you have created a website. But what now? How do you get it online?
Deployment refers to all of the necessary processes involved with regards to making your website available for use by end-users. This would, of course, mean the people visiting your site.
As you can imagine there are many options for deploying a website, nonetheless there are some basic requirements that you should take into consideration regardless of your deployment strategy.
Domain Name Registration
Finding your website among the other several billion websites in the world will be key for driving traffic to your site and a well-chosen URL can help substantially with this.
A Universal Resource Locator (URL) is the human-readable format of your website address. A Domain Name Server (DNS) will convert this into a computer-readable Internet Protocol (IP) address.
Some domains are free indefinitely, others for a predetermined period of time and there are many Domain Name Registrars who will assist you in purchasing a domain. A Top-Level Domain (TLD) such as a .com, .co.za, .org usually involves a fee. Others may be free such as a .tk.
It’s a good idea to choose a domain name that is easy to spell and to remember if you decide to purchase a domain name.
Hosting
Hosting provides your site with a server and can happen in many different package types. Some websites use shared hosting where multiple websites are hosted on a single server to cut costs. Other larger sites will not only require their own server but some will have their own network infrastructure by which they can themselves provide services such as hosting.
Free hosting packages could have limitations such as you don’t get to use a custom domain name, or you might not have access to server-side technologies. A basic paid for hosting plan should essentially provide you with space to store your site as well as access to server software. Through this software, you should be able to configure and use tools such as databases, email client as well as site analytics (monitoring traffic to your site).
Cloud hosting
Using a hosting provider that offers cloud hosting is an option for website hosting that has been growing significantly in popularity for some time.
Hosting your website using cloud hosting offers the benefits of a decentralised hosting package. This can mean decentralisation in terms of resources utilised to serve your site and/or decentralisation regarding the storage of your data. Effectively, this means that in the event that a system goes down your site does not go down as it can be served by another node. Decentralising your data also has the benefit that in the event of a disaster, only a single instance of your data might be destroyed while other instances in other parts of the world remain intact.
One of the downsides of decentralisation of data is that for sites where security concerns are of a particularly high priority, you may not have control over where your data is distributed.
One such cloud hosting provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cloud hosting providers will often offer different tiers of cloud hosting, using pricing models that challenge traditional hosting packages in that you only pay for the resources you use. This can make cloud hosting very attractive for many organisations and could account for why DevOps practitioners are often in demand within the current job marketplace.