An AI tool can turn a prompt into a working app in minutes. The part nobody shows you in the demo is the last mile: getting that app off a *.vercel.app
preview URL and onto yourdomain.com
with a padlock next to it.
That last mile is DNS and hosting. It's not hard, but it has two or three traps that eat an afternoon — and one that quietly eats money every month. Here's the whole path, start to finish.
Every custom-domain setup comes down to two questions: what happens when someone types yourdomain.com
, and what happens when they type www.yourdomain.com
.
yourdomain.com
with nothing in front. DNS rules say the apex normally needs an www
subdomaincname.vercel-dns.com
, your-site.netlify.app
, or your-project.pages.dev
).Then pick one as canonical and redirect the other. "www to apex" or "apex to www" — either is fine, but pick one or you'll split your SEO and confuse analytics.
The most common mistake: adding only the
www
record, then wondering whyyourdomain.com
shows a blank page. You need both, plus a redirect.
All three major hosts issue free certificates (via Let's Encrypt) and auto-renew them. You don't buy an SSL cert in 2026. But provisioning silently fails in two situations, and the error messages are useless:
Deploying to Cloudflare Pages while your domain is already on Cloudflare? None of this applies — it wires itself up.
"Free hosting" is real, but the free tiers are shaped very differently, and the thing that bites you is almost never storage — it's bandwidth and build minutes, plus one licensing clause.
Rough shape of the three most common choices (always re-check current limits — these change):
| Cloudflare Pages | Vercel (Hobby) | Netlify (Free) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | Effectively unmetered | ~100 GB/mo, then upgrade | ~100 GB/mo, overages billed | | Build minutes | 500/mo | limited | ~300/mo | | Commercial use, free tier | Allowed | Not allowed | Allowed | | Custom domain + SSL | Free | Free | Free |
Two things to internalize:
For a hobby or static/marketing site, Cloudflare Pages is the boring, honest default — genuinely generous free tier, no commercial-use asterisk. For an app with server-side logic you're iterating on, Vercel and Netlify are excellent — just budget for the paid tier from day one instead of being surprised.
www
CNAME.http://
and https://
, apex and www
, in an incognito window.That's the whole thing. The AI writes the app; this is the ten steps between "it works on my screen" and "it works on my domain."
I keep field notes like this — real builds with AI tools, timed, with the raw numbers — over at Build Lab. The full walkthrough, with screenshots of each DNS panel, is here.