So the original website (hosted on Chilli) is made and up kept in Rapidweaver 5. I went through and completely rebuilt the website in Rapidweaver 7 from scratch to give it a clean start. I should use a FTP program to log into my Chilli Dog account and delete the contents of my public_html folder before basically publishing an entirely new website to it, correct?
I am just making sure I am doing this right so I don’t royally mess this up!
Also, I downloaded FileZilla for this job and it seems to be working alright, is there a better FTP program out there I should be using?
Sounds like you have it right. Greg at Chillidog always has backups just in case. But … you can login to cPanel and manually request a backup to be downloaded to your computer. I’d do that first (just for insurance). Then delete. The upload.
You can always choose to “see” hidden files (if they are needed due to some mistake).
I don’t use Filezilla but it should be fine. I use Transmit, many are happy with Yummy. But they all do the same basics. They differ in terms of speed and special features: but that shouldn’t matter much to you right now.
And … if you want to be super super safe then just contact Greg and ask him for his advice. He’s great.
Yes, you need a good FTP program. I make a “mirror” of my web server, including invisible files, to my Mac (external disk). In fact, I have three copies. If something ever “blows up” it’s easier to just us FTP to upload the entire site again from your local backup. Yes, you could upload entire site from RW but the larger your site the easier just to upload from FTP backup. Especially if you host your own files such as video, audio, eBooks, etc. I am a very happy user of Yummy though it’s a paid product. It has some nice bells and whistles like “sync server to Mac” to keep your backups current. Not sure if Transmit has that or not…
And you need to easily be able to delete test files, old files, etc. So yes… FTP!
+1 for always creating a backup first. I usually download the entire contents via FTP to disk before making any drastic changes. Sticking to inside the public_html folder is a good idea. Messing with files outside of this folder can corrupt an account and generally aren’t safe to touch by hand. Overall, sounds good.