Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Adding a Remote Server

As you create your website on your computer, you keep it in a local root folder (see Creating a Web Page), often called a local site for short. You can think of the local site as a work-in-progress. As you shape your site—whether you’re building it from scratch or adding and modifying pages—you’ll routinely have partially finished documents sitting on your computer.

Then, after you perfect and test your pages by using the techniques described in Chapter 17, you’re ready to transfer them to a server that’s connected to the Internet. Dreamweaver calls the web server copy of your files the remote server, and gives you five ways to transfer files to it from your local site:

• FTP. By far, the most common method is FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. Just as HTTP is the process by which web pages are transferred from servers to web browsers, so FTP is the traditional way to transfer files over the Internet. If your site resides at a web hosting company or your Internet Service Provider (ISP) you’ll use this option or, even better, the SFTP option discussed next.

• SFTP stands for Secure FTP. This transfer method encrypts all your data, not just your user name and password, so information you transfer this way is unintelligible to Internet snoops. It’s the ideal way to connect to a web server, since normal FTP connections send your user name and password unencrypted, susceptible to Internet creeps; in many cases, Secure FTP is also faster. Unfortunately, not all web hosting ...