✏ Finally arrived in the Cloud ☁️
And the air is quite thin up here.
It's one thing to write frontend and backend code, build API endpoints and connect to a database. You've developed the perfect App in your local environment. Now how do you actually get it online? Hosting and deployment are another chapter.
I've some webspace on a dedicated server, with no option to install Node. But how am I supposed to learn the MERN stack if I can't experiment with my own server? Yes I can deploy a backend with API endpoints and database connection to Heroku, but if I want to have my own URL of choice, I have to access it from a frontend that's lying around on my hoster's Apache/PHP server, and it all feels like cobbling something together with duct tape.
So I asked my webhoster if it's possible to test their cloud server options for a week. Yesterday morning they gave me a login and a link to a more or less helpful "getting started" help page. The beginning was a little bumpy, I took a while to find my way through Plesk Obsidian, but after roughly 3 hours, I had my first React App online 🚀
✏ First Impressions
Awesome. I have frontend and backend together in one place. I can edit files directly on the server instead of making changes in my editor and uploading the edited files via FTP. Apparently there's also the option to easily handle deployment with Git.
Call me a noob (I am one), but if Apache/PHP and Node/JS were buildings, the former is a block of concrete and the latter a modern flexible bamboo construction.
(bamboo cathedral image source)
✏ Next:
Over the next posts, I'll collect everything I learn about Cloud Servers and related tools, starting with Plesk.
✏ Thanks for reading!
I do my best to thoroughly research the things I learn, but if you find any errors or have additions, please leave a comment below, or @ me on Twitter. If you liked this post, I invite you to subsribe to my newsletter. Until next time 👋
✏ Previous Posts
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