VibeCoding Is Just the First Step: How to Deploy Your Webpage So Others Can Actually Open It

Many people use VibeCoding or similar AI coding tools to build a neat little project, excitedly share the localhost:5173 link with a friend, and get the same response two minutes later: "It's not opening." Bilibili creator Geek Lin explains the root of this awkward situation — the problem isn't the code, it's the address.

Why localhost Won't Open for Anyone Else

localhost literally means "this machine" — it's your computer referring to itself, and it only works on your own device. Sending that address to someone else is like handing them your house key and asking them to open their front door with it. Of course it won't work.

The 5173 port in your browser's address bar during development works the same way — it's a temporary window you punched in your own wall for local debugging. Once you leave that machine, it's gone. If you want others to access your page, you need to move it off "localhost" and onto something public.

Where Does a Webpage Actually Live: Servers, IPs, and Ports

A publicly accessible webpage must live on a machine that is always on and always connected to the internet — that machine is called a server. For someone to find it, two concepts matter:

• IP address: The server's street address on the internet — it identifies which machine you're talking to.
• Port: Think of it as the room number within a building — it specifies which "room" on that server holds your webpage. You rarely type port numbers manually because the browser fills in sensible defaults for you.

Bare IP addresses are ugly and hard to remember, so people give them a nickname called a domain name. You can buy one from Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, or similar providers for a few dollars a year. That said, a domain is optional — you can start with the free subdomain a hosting platform gives you and bind your own domain once the project matures.

The Most Beginner-Friendly Deployment Option

There are many ways to deploy a site. The video picks the most beginner-friendly, lowest-friction path: Cloudflare Pages.

The workflow is: push your code to GitHub, connect the repository in Cloudflare Pages, and it automatically builds and publishes your site — giving you a free pages.dev URL accessible worldwide. GitHub Pages and Vercel follow the exact same pattern.

Even better, you can hand this entire task off to an AI. Just tell it "deploy this to Cloudflare Pages" and it will log in, upload the code, and wire everything up while you grab a coffee. Future updates are just as easy — tell the AI "redeploy my changes" and it handles everything automatically, no manual re-uploading required.

One caveat worth mentioning upfront: free tiers all have usage limits — go over them and you'll need to pay. Cloudflare also has fewer nodes inside mainland China, so Chinese users may experience slower load times.

GitHub plays the role of a "code repository" in this workflow — think of it as a cloud folder that stores your webpage's source files. Once Cloudflare Pages is connected to GitHub, every time you push changes to the repository, the platform automatically triggers a new build and deployment with zero manual steps. Vercel and GitHub Pages work on the same principle. The differences: GitHub Pages is best for purely static pages, free, and natively integrated with GitHub; Vercel has better support for frontend frameworks like React and Vue, and is generally faster for users in China than Cloudflare Pages; Cloudflare Pages has the largest global CDN footprint and the most flexible configuration. All three offer free tiers — for a personal side project, any of them will do, and the core workflow is identical.

What's That Lock? SSL Certificates Explained

Legitimate websites show a small padlock icon in the address bar and start with https — that's an encrypted connection. The technical term for that lock is an SSL certificate. It adds a layer of encryption between the browser and the server, preventing anyone from snooping on data in transit.

The good news: you don't need to pay for one. Most hosting platforms include a free certificate, and Let's Encrypt also provides free certificates with automatic renewal. From now on, when you see https and that little lock, you'll know the site is properly deployed.

The core difference between HTTP and HTTPS is whether the data in transit is encrypted. On an HTTP site without an SSL certificate, everything transmitted between the browser and server — including passwords you type — is plain text that any node in the middle can intercept and read. HTTPS uses the TLS protocol (an upgrade to SSL; the two terms are now often used interchangeably) to encrypt all data, making intercepted content unreadable. Modern browsers display a "Not Secure" warning for HTTP sites, and certain features (like accessing your location or camera) are only available on HTTPS sites. Let's Encrypt is a non-profit organization that has provided completely free certificates since 2015. Certificates are valid for 90 days and support automatic renewal. It is currently the world's most widely used certificate authority, and hosting platforms typically use it behind the scenes to automatically issue certificates for their users.

Can You Use Your Home Computer as a Server?

"My computer is a computer too — why can't it be a server?" Technically there are ways to make it work, such as tools like intranet tunneling or frp. But the video is clear: not recommended.

The reasons are practical: most residential ISP agreements prohibit running public-facing servers, home IPs change and drop, and directly exposing your personal machine to the public internet is like leaving your front door open — if something goes wrong, there's no safety net. For anything you're giving to real users, a hosting platform is far more reliable.

Operating Seriously in China: ICP Registration Is Unavoidable

If you plan to run a site long-term for a Chinese audience, the path gets longer: buy a mainland China server, point your domain to it, then submit your application through the cloud provider's backend to the regulatory authority for review — a process that typically takes one to three weeks. This is ICP registration (ICP 备案), essentially your website's "birth certificate."

Beyond that, within 30 days of going live you'll also need to complete 公安联网备案 (public security network registration). The video also mentions an emerging requirement: websites with AI-generated content will need to display a large model (大模型) disclosure label starting in 2026. Of course, if you're just tinkering personally on a free plan, none of this applies to you — just deploy and go.

ICP registration (Internet Content Provider filing) is required by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for any website using a mainland China server to provide public-facing services. The registrant can be an individual or a business — individuals need a national ID and phone number; businesses also need a business license. During the review period, the site typically must be taken offline or display a "registration in progress" notice on the homepage. Once approved, the site must display its ICP filing number at the bottom of every page (e.g., "京ICP备XXXXXXXX号"), or risk having its network access cut. If your site uses overseas servers (such as Cloudflare Pages' US nodes), it falls outside mainland China's ICP jurisdiction — but domestic users will experience slower speeds and reduced reliability, and you won't be able to resolve a .cn domain normally.

Wrapping Up

Building a webpage with AI is only the first step — it only truly "goes live" when other people can open it. The core idea is simple: move your webpage from localhost onto a publicly accessible server. For beginners, the combination of Cloudflare Pages + GitHub + AI-automated deployment is essentially the zero-cost, zero-barrier best option. When you're ready to go commercial in China, you can deal with domains, servers, and registration at that point — no need to tackle it all upfront.