Last month, I walked you through the basic tools and techniques in putting a Web page together using open source applications. This month, in part two, let's examine the tools and techniques for transferring your pages to the web server as well as the applications and methods for monitoring and securing your site, starting with hosting the site itself.

There are two different ways to host a web site.

One is to do it in-house, using your own servers, supported by your own personnel. The other is to put your pages on an ISP or web hosting site. Both types have their pros and cons. I've discussed building a basic web server in an earlier LinuxPlanet article. We won't go into the details of running a server, but we can look at techniques to copy your files to the web server, whether it is located down the hall or across the country in some ISP/web hosting data center.

Once you've built some pages for your web site, you'll need some way to get them to your server, whether local or through your Internet Service Provider.

• For local servers you can use the secure copy program called scp. Scp works just like the normal Linux cp command, except that it lets you copy files between machines. The form of the command is:

scp localfile remoteserver:/directory/filename

• For ISP or Web Hosting servers my favorite ftp client is gftp. gftp has a nice graphical interface that has your local files on the left side of the screen and remote files on the right side. It's very intuitive to use and you can highlight files, click a left or right arrow between the lists and transfer files easily. It also remembers your ISP server name, user name and other information so you don't have to type it in every time.

Next: Monitoring Your Site »