Easiest Way to Host a React or Vite App Online

Vite has revolutionized frontend tooling, making React development faster than ever. But when it’s time to show your work to the world, deployment manuals can get surprisingly complex. Let’s look at the absolute easiest way to host your app.

Static vs Dynamic Hosting

A pure React/Vite app is fundamentally a "Static Site" (SPA). Once you run the build command, Vite compiles everything down into raw HTML, CSS, and JS files waiting inside a dist folder. You don't need a Node.js server container to serve these; you just need a static host.

The Build Command

Before deploying, you typically run:

npm run build

This generates the optimized production build.

Deploying via Git

Platforms like Remoud or Netlify allow you to link your GitHub repository. When you commit and push to your main branch, the platform automatically triggers the Vite build pipeline.

1. Select your repository.
2. Make sure the branch is tracked.
3. Click Deploy.

Client-Side Routing Fix

If you use React Router, you might encounter 404 errors when a user refreshes the page directly on a route like `yourdomain.com/about`. This is because the server tries to look for a physical `/about.html` file.
On most modern PaaS providers, this is automatically configured for you so that all routes rewrite back to `index.html`.