Mapping a Domain to an App you created

The purpose of this article is to separate the ideas of Web Hosting and a Content Management System from having a Web Application running on a Domain Name you’ve purchased.

Once you’ve purchased a Domain Name with a Host and there are many, you can purchase a Web Hosting package with that Host which provides you with login access to an Administrative Panel for the Domain you’ve just purchased.

For many Hosts that Administrative Panel is cpanel and is a user interface with which you can install various Content Management Systems like WordPress for example…and then once that’s done, logging into your site’s WordPress System is another thing altogether.

But sometime’s its the case that programmatically speaking, you want to set things up so that when a person goes to a particular path at your domain, they reach an Application that you’ve created…

In other words you don’t want a Site Builder at the Domain you’ve just purchased and you don’t want to install a Content Management System to create you’re site.

You want, let’s say, an Application that you’ve created with Node.js and Express to be what’s displayed when your domain name is entered into a web client such as Firefox or Chrome or Opera.

And then when thinking about this, you’re wondering well do I need to purchase Web Hosting first or speak to my Domain Name Service to configure things to do this? The answer this question is No.

There are several things to consider:

1. Any App you’ve created needs to be running on an operating system somewhere. This is not Web Hosting. This is literally having for example a Ubuntu machine running online with your app running on a particular port. There are many services many with free tiers that provide you with such a machine.
2. The second thing to do is to login to your Domain Host, and configure your DNS records to point to the IP address of the machine running your application.