How Do You Upload Your Files To A Web Server?

Learning how to upload your file to a web server is not that difficult.  As a web developer, uploading files is one of the first steps in majority web projects.  There are an infinite number of tools, services and methods that will help you host your files on a web server.  This tutorial will provide you a step-by-step general understanding on how to upload website files using common tools.

 

Step 1 – Choose A Hosting Service

The first and probably the most important step is to choose a good and reliable hosting service.  Hosting services are responsible for your websites security, speed, stability and upload time.  This is why picking a host carefully is very important.  The last thing you want is to have issues. Some things to consider when picking a hosting service are:

• How much resources will your website need?  This will depend on your websites needs.
• Your website will be worldwide.  This is why you need to find a host that will be up 24 hours a day.
• A reliable hosting server will back up your website on a frequent basis.
• Server responsiveness is the time it takes for a server to acknowledge a domain name request.  If a site loads slowly a visitor might leave before it loads.
• Pick a hosting server type: shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting

Step 2 – Choose Your Method

Your second step will be to choose your website upload method.

File Managers

A file manager is a tool that provides users the ability to manage their websites using HTTP instead of FTP. File managers are in charge of managing a website.  They manage functions like upload, permission, organization and creation.

There are two methods to upload in PHP :

1. Use a PHP upload service that grants you full control of the process.
2. Build an HTML form that allows users to submit files.  Then you have to create a PHP file upload script to handle these files.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

File transfer protocols allow communication between computers on a TCIP/IP network.  It can be used to transfer files between two computers over the internet and network.  Developers use FTP to make changes to their website.

 

Step 3 – Upload And Extract

This is the main grunt work of uploading files to a web server.  Some web servers allow multiple connections to upload 10 files at the same time.  Other web servers do not allow this.  They have a connection limit and when you exceed the limit, the firewall will ban your IP for a little bit.

For software updates, you will have to upload a few thousand files at a time.  If you have a connection limit, this will take forever!  To avoid this, there are dedicated servers that let you increase the connection limit.  This can be done by archiving files in a single ZIP with the help of your FTP client software.  Then you can use a PHP script to extract the file.