Upload My Web Site

This guide contains simplified description of uploading and editing your website with WinSCP.

Managing website differs greatly with webhosting provider. This article just summarizes basics you need to know to edit pages on your website or to upload new pages.

Before starting you should:

Web Site Directory
File Names
Editing Pages

Web Site Directory

Once you are connected, make sure you are in the remote directory dedicated to store a web pages. It may be the one you get in after logging in (it is the case if you do not see any subdirectories after logging in). But with some providers you will have several subdirectories available, from which only one is visible on the Internet. Such subdirectory will have a name like www, htdocs, httpdocs, public_html or other.

All files you upload to this directory will be visible on the Internet. So for example if you upload your page pictures.html into your web directory htdocs and your site domain is example.com, anyone will be able to see your page at address http://example.com/pictures.html.

By convention there is a single file that gets displayed if you do not specify any file in the address directly, i.e. frontpage. The name of the file is usually index.html or index.htm (or different extension if you use some scripting language).

File Names

Before you start uploading/creating pages, make sure you use reasonable file names. It is strongly recommended not to use punctuation characters, spaces and some special characters in filenames to be published on Internet. Hence instead of Mein Gästebuch.html, use mein_gastebuch.html.

Also URL (web addresses) are case sensitive, which is different to how Windows treat filenames. So if you first test your pages locally on Windows and links stops working once you upload the pages, it is probably for inconsistencies in letter cases. For example you may have a link to Mein_Gastebuch.html, but the file is actually named mein_gastebuch.html. This is not the same on Internet.

akash kumar raj dj