A website or a web-application is a software application, which runs on some hardware. Like you install an app on your iPhone or Android, or you install software on your Laptop or Desktop. When you visit `fastn.com/book/`, your browser is contacting a software running somewhere. In general during the course of the book we will evaluate different options for hosting. For now to get started we are going to talk about a special kind of hosting, called static hosting.

You can kind of classify most websites as static or dynamic. Static sites are static, means they do not change.

If a site is static it is much simpler to manage, the hosting is much cheaper, often free. Static sites are harder to hack. Requires lower maintenance. It is a trade-off. Dynamic sites are more "feature-ful" but also more work, more money etc. Dynamic sites need to serve static media like images, but they also have to run a "application", written in some language like Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript etc. Further dynamic sites need access to some form of database, and one has to chose one, and then manage them. Managing a database is quite some work. Dynamic sites also have to worry about the load, serving static content requires lot less CPU, RAM etc, so if your site gets a lot of traffic static content fares much better than the dynamic stuff, your web application and database will have to be able to handle the load. Further sites on internet are almost constantly under attack, due to simplicity static sites, they are harder to attack than dynamic sites. For the purpose of this chapter we are going to go ahead with a static website, you will learn about how to move from static hosting provider to dynamic hosting provider in later parts of this book.

In technical terms, static hosting means HTML/CSS/JS/images. If you can code up your site using only these three technologies, then the hosting provider only has to manage HTML/CSS/JS/image files. When you are using `fastn` for your site, `fastn` can generate a folder containing these HTML/CSS/JS/image files, that you can upload to one of static hosting providers. You see, the web browser you are using only understand these technologies: HTML/CSS/JS/images. The dynamic websites generate these HTML etc, and the generated files could be different for each user, or different for same user at different times. This is the dynamic part. But if your site is static, the HTML etc that you are serving to everyone is not changing till you update your site, you have to generate these basic files, HTML/CSS etc and just upload it.

You can do your own hosting. You can get an IP address from your internet provider, and assign it to the laptop or desktop, or even your mobile phone, and run a static web server on it, and let your visitors access it. Of course this would be more work, you will have to ensure power and internet does not go, as else your site will be down and your visitors will have a bad time. A lot of people hosting their own servers, and there are internet communities for that. People do that for learning, doing everything yourself is a great learning experience, and this book will cover enough that you can do this as well, but that will not be the focus of the book. Some people also host their own servers for cost reason, after all this is the cheapest solution out there, if you go beyond some load thresholds. It is more work, but cheaper. If you are not interested in self hosting, then you have a few options. We are going to take a look at Github Pages, a static hosting solution we recommend. But there are many out there. Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, all provide a solution for hosting your static websites.

We are not affiliated with Github or Microsoft in anyway. We are promoting them because it is the best experience we personally had. They are creating an integrated whole. As you saw in previous section we are using Github for hosting our website's `git` repository. Github's `git` hosting works very well will Github Pages as you will see. Further Github comes with integrated editor, which we will take a close look in next section. Also Github Pages is FREE. No credit card required. So all in all, for learning purpose they are a great starting point. But in no way your learning going to be limited to Github offerings. During the course of the book you will learn more and will be able to make decisions most suitable for your use case.

In the previous section we created a repo and observed that we had two commits, and the second commit was made by `github-actions[bot]`.

For now we are not going to tell you how to configure anything there, what we is the content of those files, for now what is sufficient for you to learn is that “deploy site” gets called whenever a commit happens. So what does deploy site do? It does a lot. This workflow first gets a machine for you from the GitHub’s pool of machine. Then it installs an operating system on it. It then installs `fastn` on that machine. It also gets a copy of your repository. It then "builds your site". And finally it "deploys your site on Github Pages". How to get a machine for you, we will not concern ourselves with, this is the magic cloud providers have created for us. How to install operating system is also handled by them. When it comes to getting a copy of your repository, there are many ways, you can download a zip, "clone" it using `git` which we will cover later. Installing `fastn` is also quite easy, we have an installation script you can use, or you can download the `fastn` executable from our downloads page, and soon we will upload `fastn` to your operating systems App Stores etc, so you can install it like any other software you use. And "building the website", which is conveting your `.ftd` files to `.html` etc is done by `fastn` as we will show later. We are just giving a high level picture in this section, for now let Github Action will do all this for you. Let's talk about the last step, "deploying your site on Github Pages". This step requires a little bit of configuration that you have to do, and Github Action will take care of the rest.

You have tell Github to start using Github Pages for your repository. You do that by going to "Settings" tab of your repository, and click on "Pages" on the left hand side.

On your site it mentions my name! It's time we checkout our code in an [online editor. ->](/book/codespaces/)