This is correct. You had the right idea. Thank you.
Just clarifying, by “putting some of your personal projects online” you mean having a website up and searchable right? lol Just making sure we are under the same understanding.
Im aware that “searchable” is a big term, but I basically mean turning your code into a functioning website that can be visited and viewed by the public.
I view personal projects as projects you build for portfolio or learning purposes. For example a small JavaScript game, product landing page, mock up eccomerce store.
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Whether you go with GitHub pages or pay for hosting it will still be live and searchable on the web.
The only difference we are talking about is free hosting versus paying for hosting.
If you are building a small js project just for learning purposes then I would go with the free hosting of GitHub.
Build if you are being hired to build something more involved for a client or professional site for yourself then you should look into other hosting options.
Hope that clarifies!
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Ok got it! Thanks for the help!
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Yeah I think this is where a lot of my confusion is coming from. I really like GoDaddy and ive used them for a while. The customer service is great, but when it comes to this, they are really in the dark as to how to help.
Ive called and spoken with 4 reps and they all sent me to pages with information on linking a Wordpress or pages about the GoDaddy proprietary web builder.
Yeah, for friends and family and other students, you can just give them a link to your domain that points to your github site.
For general public, there’s SEO (search engine optimization) and all that (complicated to me) stuff to get high page ranking and all that…and Google changes the algorithm for that a lot.
Other search engines rank differently.
Best save all that for after you get through FCC curriculum and are ready for more advanced things. Don’t want to take on too much stuff at once and burn yourself out 
How unfortunate. But good thing you don’t have to contact them very often once everything is setup and working. 
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This is a good suggestion. Get yourself some standard web hosting that comes with a domain and web space. Upload your files using an FTP client such as FileZilla. These basic skills are being lost in the current days of web builders and CMS. If you are going to become a professional developer and build client sites then you should learn how to do this so you aren’t constrained by the likes of WordPress. That is all they do behind the scenes. As others have said if you are using backend technologies such as Node/.Net/Python/PHP etc or any database then you will need to check that your host provides/supports them but from the OP it looks like you are just using HTML/CSS/JS which should be fine on any standard web hosting package. If you are in Europe then I personally like ionos.co.uk as they are very competitively priced and I have found that the support / documentation is reasonably good.
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Exactly! I think (not directly related to this topic, but to your excellent point) the over use of sending everything as an “email attachment” and the ability to upload files via an HTML form/upload input feature, amongst the general user, have definitely contributed to the loss of knowledge of using FTP. It is best utilized in situations like this, as that is what it was designed for… File Transfer Protocol… transfer files!
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Got it. Im not sure why its so difficult to get good information about FTP from Godaddy 
. Maybe they are more centered around domain names and not hosting? Not sure. But what you are saying makes perfect sense to me.
Thanks for that information 
Crazy. At least now I have a better idea of what to look for! FTP 
. Thats the magic word I was looking for. Without that keyword, google search and YouTube was giving me the wrong information.
Thanks 
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They offer hosting, so they should know about it.
A little insight, having worked in tech support in few a call centers in the past (a good way to break into IT but don’t stay too long, you’ll go insane lol)… glad I don’t do that anymore and haven’t in a long long time…
I’m guessing the support CSRs get soooo many calls/emails from users that just want to get a wordpress or site going, that this is their canned answer response to get rid of the call and meet their support quotas. I’m sure some of the support staff must know about FTP.
This is not unique to GoDaddy. My ISP is the worst, always telling me to power cycle my cable modem, when I can prove it is their end of things.
Sounds like they just weren’t listening to you trying to tell them you are writing your own site from scratch and need to host it somewhere. Not to mention they missed a sales opportunity, but I digress
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Sadly that’s the catch-22 of self-help. You often need to know the answer before you know what to search for! 
It looks like GoDaddy offer the option to upload your files using the cPanel file manager https://uk.godaddy.com/help/upload-files-to-a-website-in-my-linux-hosting-account-3239 or FTP https://uk.godaddy.com/help/move-my-cpanel-website-with-ftp-and-filezilla-31870 with a client such as FileZilla. You will obviously need web hosting and not just domain hosting to do this.
As your code is currently in codepen you would need to copy and paste the HTML/CSS/JS code into separate files on your local machine as I’m not aware of a way to download from codepen. You would also need to flesh out your HTML with the standard html boilerplate stuff and link to your CSS and JS files as codepen takes care of this for you but that is probably beyond the scope of this thread. Might be best to start a new thread if you need help with that. As you don’t have any backend code etc you can just double click on your html file(s) on your local machine to open it in a web browser and make sure everything works properly before uploading to actual hosting. It might be stating the obvious but I’m surprised how many people don’t realise you can do this and think you need to upload to a web server before you can view a webpage. Just make sure you don’t hardcore any local paths into your code.
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Ah good to know. Yeah I figured what you mention may have been going on so I didn’t let it get the best of me. All the supports were supper nice about it, but just game me the wrong info. customer service was a1 
Yeah I have everything local on my computer as well. I just upload it to codepen as a secondary option, as a way to better show you guys my code if I run into problems.
I got it working on Pages! But now with all the recent information from you guys , I know how to go about it with hosting.
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A little late, and I don’t know if you’ve seen this or someone has posted it already, but I just came across this video:
cPanel Hosting & Filezilla FTP - Connect, Upload, And Transfer Files - GoDaddy
It might complement the links darrenwoodford gave you.
There’s also this more generic (not web host specific) video on FCC’s YouTube channel…
FCC - How to Put a Website Online
They discuss setting up FTP accounts on your host using cPanel at 47:25 if you wanted to skip ahead to that timestamp.
This is probably the last post I’ll make in this thread, as it’s getting long and I think we’ve “beaten a dead horse” so to speak. At least you know your options now 
Happy Camping!
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I would go with a host that supports continuous integration/deployment.
Using FTP or the terminal to just push code directly to production is pretty old school (it was never a great idea). Also, version control and other goodies you might get from a build system.
For Jamstack Netlify is not a bad choice.
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Codepen has an “export” function. You can find it in the bottom right of the Pen Editor View.
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Guess I got roped back in here. lol
I see your point. The conversation branched off into a discussion of things like FTP. The initial information the OP lacked was how to host a live site somewhere or point your own domain name to one or any of these resources. To me, the xfer method doesn’t matter so much, whatever works.
Filezilla is a GUI, not a terminal, but perhaps FTP is becoming antiquated, and perhaps SSH & SFTP (which might reach antiquity at some point) are more widely used. For certain things in, say, linux, sometimes it is just quicker and easier to drop into a terminal and type a one-line command than clicking through the GUI. Although, I admit topics like that are subjective, down to preference, and liable to start a flame war, so I’ll refrain.
I don’t know about web development, but these things are still used in Enterprise.
When I worked for a large Enterprise Storage System vendor, some of their stuff seemed kinda antiquated to me but they had to support many large clients with millions already invested in antiquated infrastructure, which is more common in certain industries than one might think. Banks & Government come to mind. ymmv.
Anyways good idea about the Netlify. I think I will personally check that out sometime.
The discussion did kinda get off into a rabit hole about Transfer Protocol wasn’t really my initial intent.
Whatever works for the OP. I’m not one to be tied to any specific piece of tech for the sake of being tied to it. For others it might as well be a religious belief
I am glad to have grown up in an era though where I know where a lot of things evolved from, having used them first-hand, even if just for historicity. For myself, I don’t like vendor lock or being a 1-trick pony when I can avoid it.
There’s tons of options. Sometimes maybe too many. lol
This entire thread is a treasure trove of knowledge. Thank you to everyone here for sharing!!!
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GoDaddy favors non-technical people. They do not support developers very well. I am not surprised that their support people are not experienced with developer tools. GoDaddy can be used with FTP for uploading files but they probably do not know how to do that.
I think the main difference is that GitHub allows (for free) only one site per account and Netlify allows three. I believe that GitHub does not support databases but Heroku does; I am not sure about Netlify.
Use of source management for websites is relatively uncommon. It is too technical for most people.
As best as I understand what I am finding, the term static website is used to refer to websites that use just HTML, CSS and JavaScript and most of them use a source management system such as GitHub for the files. For those of us that understand Git it might be possible to have such a website for about $5 a year. I think that GitHub, Netlify and Heroku are examples of static website hosts but there are others.
Many editors support FTP built-in. However when using a source management system such as Git in GitHub FTP is not required.
Not if you are using a repository.
It is also possible to run a web server locally and use a website hosted locally. I use Microsoft IIS for that; it is provided with Windows 10. I can edit the files locally as a repository and then upload (that is called a push, correct) to GitHub and then a host such as Netlify will deploy from there.
FTP would be highly relevant except tuscannypolk mentioned using GitHub and hosts that work with GitHub and I certainly agree that use of a source management system is a better choice.