How to submit/retrieve user data—do I need a server?

How to submit/retrieve user data—do I need a server?
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#1

Hey there—I’m a beginning coder and this is my first post here. This is not one of the FCC projects.

I wrote a little web app to let me and my roommate monitor when our dog was last walked and uploaded it to github pages.

https://karlwenninger.github.io/henrywalks/

It only needs to save and retrieve the day, time and name of the person who last walked the dog. Right now the app is saving this data locally but I need to learn how to get it on some kind of server so that my roommate and I can use it on mobile.

My questions are:

  1. do I need to set up and pay for some kind of server service (I feel like this might be overkill for such a little project) or can I host the necessary files on Google Drive or Drop Box? What’s the easiest and cheapest way for me to do this?

  2. What new skills/languages should I start learning to get this simple thing done? PHP? JSON? SQL? I really don’t know.

I’ve been trying to figure this out on my own for a few days. I’m guessing that someone here can answer this easily. Thanks for your help

#2

You can set up a simple express server using node.js --> free
You can set up a small mongodDB database (<500mb) on mLab --> free
And host it on Heroku --> free (though it goes to sleeps on every half an hour of inactivity and takes 30 secs to wake up) (edit: you can also host it on glitch , it too will go to sleep however)

Your dog walking client side form would simply send a POST to your express server, server time-stamps the request and creates a new document in the database , and whenever anyone loads the app it does a GET request to the express server which goes back to the database and gets the last person who walked the dog. You should be done with the back-end in less than 50 lines, if that.
This would actually would be a good exercise to get familiar with the back end side of things.
Feel free to post questions here, plenty of people can help you out here.

#3

thank you so much for your help! Much appreciated!