Connor ClaireCourse 1

Progress

  1. Lesson 0: Five boxes, two journeys
  2. Lesson 1: Type the name, get the house
  3. Lesson 2: The phone book: A/CNAME vs MX
  4. Lesson 3: The factory: Deployments, Ready, Production
  5. Lesson 4: The cabinet: commits on main
  6. Lesson 5: Safety: Instant Rollback
  7. Lesson 6: Which dashboard?

Lesson 1 · The visit path

Type the name, get the house

You open: The browser address bar, then connorclaire.ca

In the two seconds after a visitor types connorclaire.ca, a request leaves their computer, asks Cloudflare where to go, and is handed a page by Vercel. Wi-Fi is only the last thirty feet. The rest is wires.

The address bar holds a name, not a file. The internet looks that name up. Cloudflare answers: website traffic goes to Vercel. Vercel already has a built copy of the site waiting. The browser assembles the page — sometimes in pieces — and the visitor sees connorclaire.ca.

Images and other static files are pulled from storage. They do not need Next.js rebuilt for every visitor. The framework is involved when a page has to be composed.

A request for mail is a different lookup of the same name. It never enters the Vercel factory. Lesson 2 is the phone book that sends those two travellers down different pipes.

Practice

Open connorclaire.ca in a new tab. You are looking at the end of this journey. Nothing in this lesson requires a dashboard login.

  1. Browser
  2. Cloudflare
  3. Vercel
  4. Page

Mail peels off at Cloudflare (MX) and never enters Vercel. GitHub is not on this path.

Takeaway. Name → Cloudflare → Vercel → page. You do not SSH into a server. The page is assembled in the visitor’s browser.

From the experts

Opening this lesson counts as done.