Networking can be an annoying problem for software developers. I’m not talking about local area networking or browsing the web, but the much harder problem of ad hoc, inbound, wide area networking.
Suppose you create a dazzling website on your laptop and you want to share it with your friends or customers. You could modify the firewall on your router to permit incoming web access on the port your website uses and let your users know the current IP address and port, but that could create a potential security vulnerability. Plus, it would only work if you have control over the router and you know how to configure firewalls for port redirection.
Alternatively, you could upload your website to a server, but that’s an extra step that can often become time-consuming, and maintaining dedicated servers can be a burden, both in time and money. You could spin up a small cloud instance and upload your site there, but that is also an extra step that can often become time-consuming, even though it’s often fairly cheap.