Deploying a Full-Stack LMS on Shared Hosting + Render (Free) — The Hard Way

How we shipped a production Node.js + React + PostgreSQL app without a VPS, and every painful lesson along the way.

The Situation

We built a full Learning Management System for G3HUB — a React frontend, a Node.js/Express API, and a PostgreSQL database. The only infrastructure we had was a cPanel shared hosting account (Truehost Nigeria) that was already running a WordPress site.

Most deployment tutorials assume you have a VPS or cloud VM. We didn't. We had shared hosting, a deadline, and a problem to solve.

This is the story of how we deployed it anyway — every wall we hit, every workaround we found, and what we'd do differently next time.