# Web hosting

You need some web hosting (with PHP support) for this course (and the follow-up courses as well)
Using your own webhosting is allowed, but:
- No free hosting that displays ads
- No free hosting that puts pages in a frame
- No account shared with other students
- Hosting needs to be online 24/7
We recommend the web hosting that is supported by students from our school at https://sinners.be/ (only € 5/year)

# Web hosting at sinners.be

WARNING

Use only lower case letters for your username
Don't use spaces or special characters (underscore, é, ï, ...) in your username
Preferably, but not mandatory: concatenate your first name and your surname
E.g.: if your real name is John Doe, use johndoe as your username
The URL of your homepage then is: https://johndoe.sinners.be

Default homepage

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a standard network protocol to transfer files between your computer and a web server
Download a (free) FTP program of your choice
- We recommend FileZilla because it can be used for both Windows and Mac

WARNING

Don't click on the green button to download the software
- Read the description: This installer may include bundled offers, which really means: This installer includes MALWARE!
Only download using the link Show additional download options

Download FileZilla

Download FileZilla

Open FileZilla
Go to menu item Bewerken > Instellingen
Click, on the left side, on Taal and change the language to English (en_US)

Change language

Show hidden files

Open the Site Manager by clicking on the first icon in the toolbar (not on the arrow next to the icon)

Open File Manager

Click on New site and choose a name for it, e.g. username@sinners
Fill in the General tab
- Protocol: select SFTP - SSH File Transfer Protocol
- Host: sinners.be
- User: your sinners username
- Password: your sinners password

SFTP for sinners

Click on Connect to connect to your web hosting
- The left pane (Local site) shows (the file system on) your computer
- The right pane (Remote site) shows (the file system on) the web server
  - The remote site contains multiple, nested folders

IMPORTANT

ALWAYS upload your files to the public_html folder! This is the starting point for your website!

SFTP for sinners

Update your settings so that public_html is the default folder that opens when you connect to your hosting
- Open the Site Manager again by clicking on the first icon in the toolbar
- Select your entry
- Click on the Advanced tab and set the Default remote directory to /johndoe/public_html (replace johndoe with your username)
- Click on Connect to reestablish the connection

SFTP default path

Connect to your hosting
Browse in the left pane (Local site) to the folder on your computer with the local version of your site, e.g. ...\myFirstPage
- As an example, we assume that this folder ...\myFirstPage contains a HTML file index.html with the following content
```
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>My First Homepage</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>John Doe's homepage</h1>
</body>
</html>
```
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Upload index.html by dragging the file from the left pane (Local site) to the right pane (Remote site)

Upload homepage

Overwrite the existing page

New homepage

CONGRATULATIONS

You have just published your first webpage on the World Wide Web 😃!

REMARKS

Likewise, you can download files from your webserver to your computer by dragging them from the right pane (Remote site) to the left pane (Local site)
- If you apply git-based version control on your projects you always have an up-to-date copy of your projects on GitHub and you normally don't have to do this
Obviously, you can select multiple files and/or folders and drag (upload or download) them at once