How to make an application run "online"

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 2:46 AM Daniel Tkach <hokanokoto at gmail.com> wrote:
> What I want to do now is ... I want the Kajabi product be activated for that user as soon as he checks out on Shopify and there's a new order, and I want this not to depend on my computer.
>

The first part of that can be done in two ways. One of them depends
100% on Shopify, the other doesn't. Look at Shopify's API to see if
they have a way to receive notifications, and if so, great! Program
against that. The other option is way less efficient. It's called
"polling" - you set your script up to query Shopify periodically and
see if there's anything new. You'll have to decide a balance between
prompt reaction to orders and load on your and Shopify's servers. If
you poll every hour, a new order may take up to an hour to be noticed
(on average, orders will wait half an hour before they're seen).
Depending on what you're doing, an hour might be fine; even twelve
hours might be okay. But that's for you to decide.

The second part - having it not depend on your computer - is called
deployment. You get some _other_ computer for it to depend on. There
are a variety of places where you can do that, but before you decide,
figure out what it is you need (ie solve the previous problem). There
are a variety of commercial hosting platforms out there; as a general
rule, you'll pay more if you want more flexibility, so the more
restrictions you're willing to accept, the cheaper it'll be.

That's just a very broad overview, but hopefully it'll be enough to
start researching on!

ChrisA