How does everyone test their new pages or changes to their websites or their clients? I am testing new verisions of the layout and style of my clients website and also adding new pages to their site, but I do not want to make the pages live until I get approval. I need a way to show the pages to my clients on some sort of testing server that is only accessible via password and is not crawled by the search bots. To stop the bots I will disallow that directory via my robots.txt file, but does anyone have a solution for the testing server? What do other people do in regards to this issue? My site is hosted on a windows GoDaddy server.
You can usually login to your clients account with your root password, otherwise if you have SSH Access you might already have all of their passwords and username. Just login to WHM and click the cPanel Symbol next to their account.
I already have their login to their files. I want a place where I can do some live testing but not live to anyone on the internet. It is not about access, it is about testing on a live server that no one has access to except who I specify.
Yeah but I want to be able to set the permission levels for this subfolder. I know people won't be able to find it unless they know the URL but I want to be extra careful. And GoDaddy is of no help since I am on a Windows hosted server and they use asp.net which isn't an easy to set passwords for directories as php is.
Only give the URL out to the people who need it. I believe you can set security in the web.config file of your application if you as using the .NET environment