The website is now fully tested and client is happy for it to go live.

As part of this article: DOWNLOAD Deployment Guide Document Template FOR FREE! You may just be a developer and your client has an another department that does the deployment for you. The Deployment Guide document template is very important to ensure that the person on that deployment department deploys successfully.

It’s now time for us to setup the live hosting service before we can transfer the files over.

Selecting Hosting Service

Selecting a hosting service can be a daunting task. They may look cheap but have they got good support, etc? Below are some advice that I can give when selecting hosting service:

– Look at review websites for a particular company that you’re interested to get your hosting service with. Check and ensure that various review websites all say the same thing. Check the comments from people who have had their websites hosted with that company.

– Check if the hosting company supports your need in terms of the type of coding they’re supporting, database, etc. Some host companies only support PHP and MySQL but some also support ASP.NET, etc. Ensure that the website you’ve developed can run on their environment.

– Check what the support is like. You can normally “test” this by sending a support email. These hosting companies normally have a Contact Us form on their website. Try sending an enquiry and see how long they get back to you.

– Check price (of course). Windows hosting is definitely more expensive than Linux hosting. You generally need Windows hosting if you program in ASP.NET otherwise Linux hosting will be sufficient.

– Check how much quota you have (ie. no of emails, databases, sub-domains, etc). If you know that your client will be creating a lot of email addresses, you may need to get higher plans.

Configuring Hosting

– You can use FTP clients such as FileZilla (free) to transfer files with.

– Create temporary redirection mechanism so that you have the time to test the production website before it goes fully live. This can be approached below:

* Create an index.html file that contains “This website is under construction” message or similar to the root folder so that when visitors are trying to access http://www.thenewproductionwebsite.com/, they see the “website under construction” message. The downside of this approach is, some IT-savvy visitors may be able to play around the URL eg. visiting http://www.thenewproductionwebsite.com/Home.php and they may end-up seeing the production website. That’s fine if the website runs correctly but what if it doesn’t?

* Ask the hosting provider to redirect ALL requests to http://www.thenewproductionwebsite.com/ to a temporary space/file. You can then create a sub-domain for testing eg. http://testing.thenewproductionwebsite.com/.

Please note that these are only required if you’re not sure that the live website will run correctly after deployment. Your UAT environment may be different from the live environment. You may not use the same hosting provider hence server configuration may be different.

Before Going Live

Before your website goes live please make sure that everything runs correctly. Forms can send emails, user can register, the website has write permission to the required files, etc. It’s embarassing when the website goes live and visitors try to register and the website then shows an error message.

So….that’s all for now. From this point on, I’ll go deeper and deeper into designing and developing professional website!

Cheers and see you soon,

Tommy