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so i am busy developing a website for a client. However in order for her to see the website she need to come to the office. Is there any way that i can upload the files and assign like a private URL to let the customer preview and play around with the website without it being live? Will really appreciate the answers

user9422677
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No there is no way for a private URL. But you can use free domain hosting for testing and to show the demo to your client like www.000webhost.com .

Ahsan Azwar
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  • The risk is that the customer then uses the free hosting, makes the best copy they can of your work and you lose a long term customer. – Ewan Feb 11 '19 at 12:42
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Considering they will need a professional (paid) web hosting service (plus a domain) for when the website goes live, I would suggest that they get one if they haven't already. Then you could setup a subdomain of the website for testing purposes and point it to the uploaded site, and once it's finished disable/delete the subdomain and point the real URL to the site. This is your best bet.

However, I would recommend to you, as a web designer/developer, you should yourself invest in web hosting/domain of your own, and use it as your development server. Then you can still do as I suggested above, but on your own hosting. Then obviously upload the finished site to their web hosting. In the long run, this will serve you a great deal while you develop your skills and get more clients.

I speak from experience, free hosting/domains are never as straight forward and reliable like the paid ones. I started out using free hosting for developing on, but it just wasn't a great experience. They aren't as secure either.

In terms of which hosting service (paid) to go for, I use 1and1.co.uk (with their sister site being the .com version too for anyone not in the UK). I can recommend them, and have been good providing you go for a linux package. All in all if you go for a paid service, have a shop around for the best prices.

To answer your question more directly, no there isn't a 'private' URL to give the client. However, there are certain things you can do to stop google indexing the site in search engines and making it more public. Have a look at this article about the meta tags. Also have a look at this SO Q&As

Studocwho
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When I developed websites, I used to send the customer all the files and tell then to copy them to their C drive. Then I told them what the url would be for their web browser to see the website on their C drive.

Otherwise, I had my own website and I used to add their pages to my website and send them a link. As there were no links from my website to the customer's website pages, I assumed nobody else would ever see the pages, other than the customer I had sent the link to.

Ewan
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