Strapi, does it need a custom admin panel for customers?

Questions and Answers
2

Welcome to the Community @jahs :cake: :wave:
To try answer your question.

  1. Strapi can be hosted really on any VPS system (Heroku, render, railway, google cloud, aws, digital ocean, or even your own VPS server) Depending on what you host it on you can do both. Redirect your own domain to a server or point your domain to a server. (When using heroku you can either use their URL or create your own which I think costs extra on heroku. Though hosting your own or using AWS, Google Cloud etc pointing your domain to the server doesn’t cost any extra)
    So both can be used.

  2. This boils down to usage of your application. But both again will work. The strapi admin panel is there to add data, just like if you ever used Wordpress the Wordpress UI was on the server for people to add data to it. The difference between a Headless CMS and let’s say a traditional CMS is that it’s detached, you don’t need to have the front end running on the same server as where strapi is. Wordpress runs on the same server both front and back (though you can detach it I think)

So again up to you how you want to do it, just note, in production mode you can only add new data to it not create new collection types (aka change the data structure etc) as an example.
In production you have maybe already added a blog, with a title, content and a author.
You can add as many blog posts as you want but in production you can’t add let’s say published date. You will then have to do this on your own local machine, change the schema then push it to heroku with git and then you can use the new values.

Hope this helps :slight_smile: