Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Adding a Remote Server

As you work on your website on your computer—whether you build the site from scratch or add and modify existing pages—you keep your files 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; you’ll routinely have partially finished documents sitting on your computer.

After you perfect and test your pages using the techniques described in Chapter 16, you’re ready to transfer those pages to a server that’s connected to the Internet; this web server stores copies of your site files so it can dispense them to visitors.

Dreamweaver calls this server the remote server, and you can transfer your local site files to it several ways:

• 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 from one drive to another 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. One downside of FTP is that none of the information you transfer using it—including your user name and password—is encrypted. It’s possible, therefore (though very unlikely), for someone monitoring the flow of data over the Internet to spot your user name and password and log into your web server and wreak havoc on your site.

• SFTP stands for Secure ...