Cloud & Infrastructure · Level 1
Where does it live
Mission briefing
Mission 3-A: Your redesign looks flawless on staging. You show it to a stakeholder on the real site — and a component is using last month's styling. "It works on my machine" is about to become a sentence you understand from the inside.
The site doesn't live on your laptop — it lives on a server, a computer somewhere that's always on, handing out the site to anyone who visits. Your machine has your local copy. The server has the copy the world sees. They're not automatically the same.
Renting space on those always-on computers is called hosting. We host the site with a provider so we don't run the machines ourselves. Think of it like renting a storefront instead of building one.
Here's the key thing: we run multiple environments — separate copies of the site for different purposes. Staging is the rehearsal space. Production is the live show the public sees. Your redesign is on staging. The stakeholder was looking at production. Same site, different stage.
So nothing's broken — I was just showing the wrong copy. And the address bar difference I ignored? That's DNS doing its job, pointing each name at the right server.
Your work looks right on staging but old on the live site. What's happening?