Web Hosting For Expressjs Apps

Once your Expressjs App is complete enough to go into production, it needs to be hosted somewhere public and more permanent than your development computer. This article offers guidance for choosing an appropriate host platform, provides a quick review of steps needed to prepare it for production, as well as provides a working example that can be deployed onto Railway cloud hosting service.

There are various hosting providers who support Node/Express. Some provide Platform as a Service (PaaS), which handles the server infrastructure so you can focus on creating your web application; while others offer traditional Server as a Service (IaaS) which gives more freedom regarding hardware and software installations on servers.

Starting an Express app could not be simpler: just create one file app which starts a server listening on port 3000 for requests from a specific URL or route and responds with “Hello World!” on every request received. Furthermore, setting up a local development environment provides invaluable assistance when testing, debugging and iterating code.

Netlify is one of the go-to choices for hosting Express applications, providing an effortless deployment process and global content delivery network (CDN), along with features that make it ideal for front-end developers. Its free tier and ease of use make it ideal for hobbyists and indie developers, while its database integration and full stack functionality makes it well-suited to startups looking to grow user bases and validate MVPs.