Hosting a Website

Contentstack is platform-agnostic, so you can use any hosting provider or architecture you prefer. However, we can provide some recommendations that may make hosting your website quicker and easier.

Additional Resource: Before you start with your project, first you need to determine the suitable deployment model for the project. Here's an article on Architecture Planning and Deployment Models that will help you choose the right one.

Let’s look at the essential steps involved in getting your website up and running.

Steps to host a website

Hosting a website is a four-step process. Let's look at them in detail.

1. Decide the type of website

   There are two types of websites:

   • Static or Basic Websites: A simple site with limited functionalities and no option for any interactivity.
   • Dynamic Websites: CMS-driven sites that allow you to manipulate content directly and enables user interactivity.

2. Choose your hosting server and other services

   While choosing a web hosting provider, make sure it provides typical but essential benefits such as solid firewall protection, data backup, domain name registration, technical support, email services, and website building tools and applications.

   Choose other providers that support all the technologies that you intend to use. Here are some of the recommended third-party services that you can consider when setting up your site:

   • Amazon Web Services is highly recommended for the flexibility it provides in terms of scaling and pricing.
   • Pingdom helps you monitor your site from across the globe using the various edge locations.
   • PagerDuty sends incident notifications alerts via email, push, SMS, and phone to on-call engineer, provide on-call scheduling, and more to help teams detect and fix infrastructure problems.
   • CDN (AWS Cloudfront or Fastly) is highly recommended for your website to provide end-users with blazing fast content delivery and low latency, as these providers have a global network of edge locations.

3. Change your DNS address

   Change the Name Servers (a.k.a. Domain Name Servers or DNS) of your domain. The domain used for the website will be hosted on Route53. This gives very low-latency access to DNS.

4. Upload your website

   Use Contentstack to host the content of your website.

Things to consider

Here are some of the other essential factors that need to be considered when hosting a website through Contentstack:

• Load Balancer: Make use of Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), as this will ensure the website traffic is evenly distributed across your EC2 instances.
• EC2 instances: You can choose either t2.medium for low traffic or c5.large for high traffic websites.

Additional Resources: For more information, you can read our JavaScript SDK documentation on creating and hosting a Contentstack site using JavaScript SDK. You can also refer to our detailed guides on hosting your website on Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3.