Hi all,

 

I have come here to seek a little advice from anyone who might be able to help.

 

I'm in charge of my boss' clinic new website design. I have hired someone on elance.com to help me design the full website, along with uploading the website onto the server upon completion.

 

Problem is, we have given the designer the FTP login settings, she told me that she is unable to login without full host access (otherwise I could not update at the backend in the future)

 

Our web host doesn't have a login page on their website. We originally registered as a package including web design and they had given us a FTP setting with username and password. We in the past had been able to update our old website by designing on dreamweaver and uploading onto FTP without problems.

 

I don't know what the designer wants or means, and can she not upload our website at all without host access?? I'm confused and frustrated as I'm not tech savvy at all and this is my work responsibility for now.

 

Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

Thank you!!

 

Jill

Oh I forgot to mention she's already complete designing our new website, just awaiting to upload.

 

She won't/can't upload until she has that host access.

I'm not sure why she has a problem either.

 

All she should need is the url for the ftp like ftp://www.your-domain.com/ or sometimes numbers like ftp://168.24.245.27:2093 and a username and password. There might be a warning about a certificate being out of date, which I usually ignore.

 

Is the hosting service one of the major ones or a private hosting service?

 

If you can access the server, does it have a control panel like cPanel? If so you could look for a menu for ftp access and see if you can set up another account with username and password.

Edited January 6, 201313 yr by Wickham

Does the new site have a database backend? If so your designer would need to create the DB on the host which cannot be done using FTP. Just a thought!

Following up from what Wickham and GalaxyTramp have said, technically speaking FTP is all that's required to upload a site. However, if your site is dynamic (needs a database) then the developer will need access to your database administration page (usually either in cPanel/Plesk or standalone if you don't have either of those)

 

The most common is phpMyAdmin but there are others. Check with the designer if they need database access and if you don't find anything from your hosting setup emails relating to it, get in touch with them and ask them if they have something that the designer can use

 

There is one other possibility and that's that the designers IP isn't allowed through your host's firewall. This would mean you would need the designer's IP address and supply it to your host so that they can allow it

Edited January 6, 201313 yr by Jay Gilford

Hi everyone,

 

Thank you for your advice!

 

I think you all are right, and our company does have database, hence she will need to access admin, etc.

 

Because our web host does not have that login page, how shall I go about obtaining the details for my web designer to access our host and upload our website onto the www? Is there a way to go around it? ie software, etc?

 

Thanks so much!

 

Regards

Jill

Most web hosts provide at least 2 pairs of username/passwords - one to access the account and one to access the cpanel for uploading files and administering to the database via something like phpmyadmin. And there is often another username/password combination to access the database. If you don't have these anymore, you'll have to speak to the host provider.

 

To upload files, you really only need to access the cpanel. Try keying :2082 after your website root (e.g. www.example.com:2082) which brings up the cpanel login form.

 

If there are a lot of files in different folders to upload, I would recommend using FTP software such as Filezilla which lets you upload folders and files in batches.

You shouldn't really be using ftp to deploy websites. There are far better ways.

 

If you're just starting out then fair enough, but ideally you should be doing someting like this: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/from-ftp-to-git-a-deployment-story/