Hosting with Vercel

It’s time to show your website to the world. There are so many hosting services out there, including Netlify, Cloudflare, AWS Amplify, Github Pages and the list goes on. I’ve used a few of them and they’re all pretty good but I do like Vercel’s dashboard and ease of use so I have gravitated towards it.

Deploying with Vercel (the easiest way)

Go to https://vercel.com and create an account (easier to use Github/GItlab so it is easy to connect projects). After that start a project by simply importing your project. Which should pop up in the dashboard

Assuming you are using a React/NextJs or Astro app potentially. When configuring the project you will see a framework preset which basically does all the build commands for you automagically. Alternatively you can put in your own build commands depending on what your project needs to make a build.

Then you will get an option to enter any sensitive API Keys or data that used through your app. (The stuff you put in your .env file that contains all sensitive data)

That is essentially it! Click the giant deploy button and assuming you have made a build already locally, it should be mostly fine.

Integrating CI/CD Pipelines

Alternatively, if you prefer to not expose your code to Vercel. You can use GitHub Actions to deploy your website. Which I shall elaborate further on…