MERN and MongoDB hosting

Question

So I possibly have a dumb question about MongoDB hosting. I'm learning the MERN stack and can't figure out how to host my app. Most of the tutorials I've seen use Heroku I believe, but it's just yet another service or thing to learn or manage. I've used Postman to verify the code works. And yes I've googled this, which only confused me more.

1. I have several Dreamhost domains, but can't find much info on using it to host MongoDB. Is it possible to use my current host or do I HAVE to point the DNS or whatever to another server/service, or just plain move my domain to a different provider?
2. Also, I've got a client/front-end directory and an api/server directory in my root folder. Is that standard practice, do I need to upload them to different hosts, merge them or what? I cannot for the life of me get the backend to work.

Edit/Update:Thank you for the response! Sorry im just now answering. It was a crazy week. The code itself works. I built a portfolio blog with a login/register system with express/mongodb to store users and posts. ALL my domains are on dreamhost and didn't want to spread out service providers if I could help it. I've built websites with PHP and SQL on there and it was easy. But from what I could find out MongoDB cannot be used on dreamhost servers. I ended up using heroku, which worked, although I haven't been able to point my DNS from my dreamhost domain to it yet. Currently it has a domain name of ***.herokuapp.com and is hosted on heroku. So that's where my problem is now, but still want to figure understand the why and how a little better. How is MongoDB different from SQL other than the relational aspect and why does it need something like heroku as opposed to dreamhost or blue host or godaddy?

Answer 1

So first thing first, you should know that MongoDb is hosted on an OS, now that can be your own system, cloud server or a service provider.

1. Domain name are nothing but just a pointer to your actual server. So you have to host your MondoDb somewhere, whether that be a service like Mongo Atlas or you have to spin up your own server on digitalocean, AWS, gcp etc.

2. For that need to see what are you actually doing, can't comment without having a look at your code. If you not comfortable sharing all the code online. You can personally chat with me.