My website won't load

Work through these in order.

1. Is the address right?

Your site’s address is shown under its name at the top of its project page, in the form your-site.smilehosting.tech. Websites are only shown on smilehosting.tech - an old link using any other domain won’t work.

The page you get tells you a lot. See What visitors might see.

2. Is it deployed?

Open the website in your dashboard. The status at the top should say Ready.

• Offline - press Deploy.
• Building - wait a moment. Apps can take a minute or two while their dependencies install.
• A Choose a new address box appears - your subdomain was blocked. Pick a new one, then deploy.

3. Static site: is index.html where it should be?

• Your home page must be called exactly index.html, in lowercase.
• If it’s inside a folder such as dist, build or public, set Output Directory to that folder under Settings > Build & Output Settings, then Redeploy.
• Changed your files? Press Redeploy.
• Still seeing the old version? Your browser may be showing a saved copy - press Ctrl + F5 (or Cmd + Shift + R on a Mac) to reload it properly.

More on this in Deploy a static site.

4. App: is it listening on the right port?

Your app must use the port in the PORT environment variable, not one you chose:

const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;

port = int(os.environ.get("PORT", 5000))

If your code has a fixed number, like app.listen(8080), the address won’t reach it.

5. App: is it listening on 0.0.0.0?

Apps listening on localhost or 127.0.0.1 can only be reached from inside the server. Listen on 0.0.0.0:

app.listen(port, '0.0.0.0');

app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=port)

Some tools need this passed on the command line instead - for example Vite’s --host 0.0.0.0.

6. App: what do the logs say?

Open the Logs tab and press Redeploy. Look for:

• errors while installing dependencies - usually a typo in package.json or requirements.txt
• Cannot find module or ModuleNotFoundError - see Cannot find module
• the line where your app says which address and port it’s listening on - it should say 0.0.0.0 and the right port

7. Is it a Website?

Only servers created with the type Website get an address. A Discord Bot server can’t serve a website. If you picked the wrong type, create a new website and move your files over.

Still not working? Open a ticket with your site’s address and the start of your logs.