What is external hosting?

External hosting is when a service other than CloudCannon serves your website to visitors, while your team edits the content in CloudCannon. Hosting your Site through CloudCannon is optional.

CloudCannon saves every content change to your Git Repository, so any hosting provider that builds from your Git Repository or a branch of it can publish those changes. External hosting may be right for you if your website needs server-side rendering, your organization already runs its own hosting, or you want features your hosting provider offers.

For more information on hosting through CloudCannon instead, please read our documentation on what web hosting is.

Ways to host your Site externally#

You can host your Site externally in two ways. The difference is which service builds your Site.

Your hosting provider builds your Site

You connect your hosting provider (e.g., Netlify or Vercel) to the same Git Repository and branch as your CloudCannon Site. When your team saves changes in CloudCannon, CloudCannon commits them to the branch, and your hosting provider builds and publishes the new version.

CloudCannon can still build your Site for its own use, such as the Visual Editor and your Testing Domain. If you don't need those, you can turn off building and hosting on CloudCannon with Headless Mode. For more information, please read our documentation on what Headless Mode is and Netlify hosting with CloudCannon editing.

CloudCannon builds your Site and deploys the output

CloudCannon builds your Site, then a Build Deploy commits the built files to a branch of a Git Repository after each successful build. Your hosting provider serves the files from that branch without building them again. This suits hosting providers that serve static files, and keeps one build for both editing and hosting. For more information, please read our documentation on outputting a built Site from CloudCannon to an external provider.

What changes when you host externally#

CloudCannon's hosting features only apply to the Sites CloudCannon hosts. When you host externally, configure these features with your hosting provider instead:

• Serving your Site on a Custom Domain, and its SSL Certificates.
• Redirects and headers in a routing.json file. For more information, please read our documentation on configuring custom routing.
• Password, user account, and SAML authentication for visitors. For more information, please read our documentation on what authentication is.

You can still manage your domain's DNS records with CloudCannon DNS and point them at your hosting provider. A Site that CloudCannon doesn't serve on a Custom Domain doesn't count toward the number of Custom Domains in your Subscription Plan.