Best way to display a website to client before going live

Some_randomer

Hi all, I'm developing a website and I'm new to web hosting and deployment etc. Just wondering what's the best way to display the site online so it can be tried out? I want to be able to prototype it and show it to the client (who lives in a different country) and have him comment and give me feedback on it before it goes live.

I'm sure this is a common scenario, so does anyone know the best way to do this? Maybe some web hosting companies offer a trial where I could upload the site and have a hidden / temporary url before the site goes live? This could be standard practice I have no idea, so any tips appreciated

TIA

devildriver

I tend to go for a very simple approach.

If your site is www.mysite.com

I will usually have a holding page at:

mysite.com/index.html

and the preview of the site for the client at:

mysite.com/hardtoguessurl.html

or something similar if you see what I mean.

Nobody without the actual url will be able to see it and if you are concerned about search engines then modify your robots.txt file.

Hope that helps.

Some_randomer

Sounds great thanks. Was wondering though if there's a way to do it before picking a web hosting company? I was thinking of uploading to dropbox but I'm pretty sure the index.htm file will be displayed as text and not rendered.

devildriver

Some_randomer wrote: »

Sounds great thanks. Was wondering though if there's a way to do it before picking a web hosting company? I was thinking of uploading to dropbox but I'm pretty sure the index.htm file will be displayed as text and not rendered.

Normally yes. Bu there are a couple of hacks so that you can use Dropbox for basic html hosting:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-host-a-dropbox-website/

Not sure which of those is best but I think I remember trying Pancake before and it worked pretty well.

You could also try hosting locally with MAMP and setting up DynDNS to make it publicly accessible but that's a bit tricky to setup.

smash

Do you have your own site? You could host if at yoursite.com/clientname

Some_randomer

smash wrote: »

Do you have your own site? You could host if at yoursite.com/clientname

Hi thanks, no I haven't picked a web host or even a domain name yet, trying to find a way to do it before I pick a host provider.

gouche

You could always create an AWS instance to host it.
Amazon have a free tier for a year which will allow you enough traffic to test and display the site to clients.

You would need to set up a LAMP server on the instance however and AWS can be a bit daunting to get around at first.

blue4ever

I think getting your own server space is important. I norrmally make a subdomain on my server and password protect it - give the client access all s/he wants then: client.mysite.com

Some_randomer

For anyone that's interested I found this nifty piece of kit called Finch that gives you a temporary random url. It basically copies the files from your local dev environment up to their servers and assigns a random url that can be sent to others to view. It also automagically updates any changes made locally. I've used it and it works very well. It does time out after a while though which means running it again and getting a different url but this is only a minor inconvenience. It's free for now as it's in beta mode but it looks like they plan to start charging for it eventually. Also it needs node/npm for installation:

https://meetfinch.com/