I manage a small archaeology conference website that mainly provides news and PDF documents for members. The site only needs updates once or twice a year. I previously used a Plesk hosting account, where I could upload PDFs into a website folder and link to them from the pages. After a hosting interface change, I thought that option had been replaced with Node.js hosting slots. Can a Node.js application serve PDFs in the same straightforward way, or is there a simpler setup I should use?
2 Answers
Yes, Node.js can serve PDFs as static files. You would place them in a public directory and configure the application to make that directory available, then link to each file with a normal URL. However, for a site that only needs occasional updates, a static hosting setup or the existing file-management tools may be simpler than adding a Node.js application. Before rebuilding anything, check whether the hosting provider merely renamed or moved the Plesk login in its updated interface.
If you do use Node.js, keep the setup minimal: upload the PDFs through SFTP or SSH, serve them from a static folder, and use a process manager plus a reverse proxy if the hosting plan requires them. SSL can be handled with the provider or a certificate tool. That approach works, but it is more administrative work than the old workflow of uploading files to a folder and linking to them.
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