4: Hosting

Namecheap

We used Namecheap (www.namecheap.com) to obtain our domain name (nettunes.me). They provide free .me domains to university students for one year at https://nc.me/. We then connected this domain name to our GCP project.

GCP Server

We used GCP (Google Cloud Platform) to deploy our website. First, we created a GCP project for App Engine. App Engine offers abstracted computing power, which allows us to focus on the code and not the infrastructure. We included a .yaml to configure the server. After testing our app in the local GCP environment, we deployed it with the simple command gcloud app deploy from the directory also containing the .yaml file. We used the GCP SQL storage to create a PostgreSQL database instance. Within that instance, we created a database for our website to use. In order to connect to the GCP database, we set up the SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI in the .yaml file. Proper set up of this file is crucial to successfully deploying the website.