Version one was code complete on the tenth with nothing deployed. The owner spent the next day working through the account guide the manager had written for them: the domain registrar and zone, the two storage buckets for media and backups, the transactional mail domain, and a catch-all so that mail to any address at the domain reaches them. Then a server, in Europe on price, and the deploy guide from the top.
What went wrong, and got fixed
The guide’s setup blocks were rewritten twice during the day so that each one pastes into a terminal in one go, with the password step on its own line. Small things, but they are what a first deploy is made of.
Where it stands
By the morning of the eleventh the site was up: three containers healthy, certificates obtained for the bare domain and its www twin, backups and the first backup check done. The proxy in front of it was still off, by design, so the first deploy had as few moving parts as possible. Switching it on is its own story.
Payments are not connected. The owner decided to defer that until the business side is in place, so the store shows a plain “not set up yet” instead of a checkout. The guide marks the three steps that wait on it.