This tip involves cpanel over a LAMP platform, assumes a shared hosting account or vps, closely similar to that implemented by HostGator (one of the largest hosting companies).

Okay - so you have exported your RSD built website (or one of its siblings) and made whatever adjustments/edits. Now you are ready to upload it. Some of my work ends up with 150 or more files between the html output, the RSD bundled folder stuff, and the associated AJAX *.php files, plus the form action *.php files.

Now that isn't too bad, but what if you are using something like an SDK, some specialized library that has suffered from bloat as it has attempted to address a dozen CMS options all in one bundle. These can (literally) include a couple THOUSAND files. Depending on what FTP client you use and what options there are to protect against overwriting existing files - this can become a nightmare, your FTP client can time out and stop in the middle of the batch, leaving you attempting to figure out where it left off etc.

I had a h-u-g-e SDK plus a 149 file RSD + to upload and OVERWRITE many, many v0.02a (alpha test bed version)

Since the test bed is in a sub-domain I created for this purpose - I decided to try something just to find out if it would work.

I deleted the sub-domain's folder and a couple dozen sub-folders. I put the local source folder into a zipped/compressed folder. Inside of the archive it had one root folder (the sub-domain root) and all of the stuff in that folder and sub-folders below that. I uploaded the single 2.7M zip file. Then, inside cpanel file manager I 'unzipped' that file and virtually as fast as you can extract a local zip file, my sub-domain and all 2,000+ of its folders and files and files and files - were recreated on the host. This may be old hat stuff for some of you, but if you are like me and have sat through many laborious uploads one file at a time... with various do you wish to overwrite the files? prompts... slowing things down to a crawl... all I can say is that this was like *MAGIC* to me.

Caveat Emptor - be sure your host will allow you to extract a zip file remotely. Be sure you don't have valuable stuff on the host that you don't have backed up, just in case. Then create a new backup anyway, just in case.

In my case - this worked perfectly because I have a home web server on my LAN that is running XAMPP on localhost. It is a reasonably strong LAMP client for development and 98% of the stuff I do works just the same on this local development bed as it does on a HostGator shared business account. Locally the path is xampp\htdocs\<domain>\<sub-domain> so per my example - I zip up <sub-doman>, upload it to the remote test bed <domain> folder, unzip it via cpanel file manager, and voila - the client can view it. The only file I have to change is the MySQL connection setup file to reflect the database name, user name and password for the respective host.

Probably somebody here that has been doing this the hard way (like me) and can benefit from this far more efficient way of doing a major update on a cpanel LAMP host.

Regards,
Gordon