Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Bolt have made it incredibly easy to build working applications. Our CEO at Speakup started building internal dashboards and tools himself. That's great.

But I noticed something: he still needed the NOC team to deploy the app and get things like email and DNS working. And that's not an exception. It's the rule.

Building got easy. Deploying didn't.

AI has democratized building. You can spin up a working Next.js app in a weekend. But the moment you want to replace localhost:3000 with a real domain, you hit the same wall as always:

Where do you run this? A VPS? Vercel? How do you choose?
DNS records: A, AAAA, CNAME. What points where?
HTTPS via Let's Encrypt: auto-renew, or manual and forgotten?
Database: is it running inside your container? Does it survive a docker restart?
Backups: who makes them, where are they, and have you ever tested a restore?
Email: if your app sends mail without SPF/DKIM/DMARC, everything lands in spam

A real example

Someone builds an app with Bolt. Frontend, backend, database, it works locally. Then:

$ ssh root@my-vps
$ git clone ...
$ docker compose up -d
$ # ...now what?

The app runs. But there's no reverse proxy, no SSL, no domain connected. The database has no volume mount, so a container restart wipes everything. There's no monitoring, so when the app crashes at 3 AM, nobody notices until the next morning.

This isn't a hypothetical scenario. This is what I regularly encounter.

What actually needs to happen

A minimal production setup for a web app looks roughly like this:

Reverse proxy (nginx or Caddy) with automatic TLS
DNS configured correctly, including CAA records
Database with persistent storage and daily backups
Environment variables outside the repo, not hardcoded
Monitoring: at minimum uptime checks and disk space alerts
Firewall: only the ports you actually need
CI/CD: push to main = automatic deploy

None of these things are complicated. But if you've never done them before, it'll cost you days figuring it out. And if you get it wrong, you won't notice until it's too late.

This is exactly why I offer the App Deployment & Hosting service. You hand me your repository, and I handle the entire stack. On Dutch infrastructure that I manage myself.