It’s finally time to publish your site!

At this stage, you have done quite a bit of work. You’ve planned, organized, and gathered information for your site; designed a mock-up; optimized all the graphics; built out all the pages; tested and validated an entire Web site; and registered a domain and secured a hosting plan. Now you are truly ready, at long last, to share your site with the world. To officially publish your site and get it online for all to see, you need to transfer all the files that make up the site that is, all the HTML files, images, CSS, external JavaScript files, SSIs, media files, and any other documents for files that are accessible through the site to the remote server that is hosting the site.

If you have registered a domain but have not secured a hosting plan, now is the time to do that and put in for the DNS transfer because you’ll need the hosting plan to be up and running before you can transfer files to the server.

Otherwise, if the hosting plan is ready, go dig up the information the host provider sent to you that shows the plan’s username and password and includes any special instructions about FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and transferring files to the host’s remote server. FTP is the most common way to transfer files to a remote server, so that’s what I discuss in this article.

In addition to finding out how to set up a remote connection to a host server with FTP, this article instructs you on how to transfer your local files both to and from the server, create a test directory on the server, upload your site to the test directory for a final round of testing, and finally, upload the site to the root level of the remote server to officially publish the site on the Web.

Uploading Files with File Transfer Protocol

File Transfer Protocol, which you can call FTP for short, refers to a standard TCP/IP Internet protocol that allows the exchange of files between remote computers over the Internet. To initiate an FTP session, a client (you) must use special software or some kind of Internet interface to log on and gain access to the remote server. Logging on typically requires the input of a special username or ID and a password that the host provider furnished when you (or your client) purchased the hosting plan.

For example, if your name is Mary Miller and your site is called MillerCheeseSticks.com, your host provider might automatically generate a username/ID and password for you, such as mmillmiller and zc79ole7. Not all host providers generate the username and password combo for you. Some provide you with temporary account information and the opportunity of resetting your username/ID and password to something else after you log on to your site.

After access to the remote server has been established for the FTP session, you may begin getting (downloading) and putting (uploading) files between your local computer and the remote server. Remember, the remote server is the live host, which means that as soon as files are copied onto the remote server, they’re publicly accessible on the Internet! When you are finished transferring your files, to end the FTP session, log off or otherwise disconnect from the remote server. The whole process is surprisingly simple.

Choosing the right FTP program

You can use many different FTP applications to transfer your files. Although their interfaces may be somewhat different, most FTP applications allow you to do the same things with your files, such as viewing a listing of files by name, date, and size and allowing you to transfer, copy, rename, and delete files and directories on the remote server.

FTP programs come in four different flavors; a stand-alone software application, an integrated feature of another software program, a tool on a host provider’s Web site control panel, or a component of a browser interface:

Software programs: Stand-alone software programs, such as WS-FTP or Fetch, must be installed on your local computer and launched like any other program each time you need to access the remote server. You may use the same program to access as many sites as you like, as long as you have the correct username and password combination for each domain. Each site can have its own “server profile.” Saved profiles archive the FTP URL, username, and password information to make future logons run faster.

Though some FTP programs have a drag-and-drop interface where you can drag files from your local desktop into the remote view of the host server, most programs consist of a single window with two panes that represent views of the local site files and the remote site files, as shown in Figure 2-1. Data may then be transferred both to and from the remote server using common interface controls such as Get, Put, Change Directory, Make Directory, Rename, Delete, and Refresh.

Integrated application: Some “FTP clients” are built-in components within other software programs that allow you to transfer files to and from a specified remote server through a special FTP panel. For example, Dreamweaver’s Files panel can be used as an FTP tool. When you expand the Files panel, you can even see both the remote and local views of the files being transferred and transfer files in either direction.

Internet control panel: Your host provider may include some kind of special Internet control panel through which you can transfer files to and from the host server. These panels are often customized Web interfaces developed by host providers and are composed of a handful of specialized Web forms. These forms allow the host’s customers (you or your client) to upload files to the remote server and occasionally to also select and download files from it.

Most control panels restrict uploads to single files at a time, rather than enabling users to specify and upload several files or folders at once. Control panels also rarely let clients have full control over the files on the remote server and may even restrict access to certain tasks such as renaming and deleting files.