No matter whether you’re using SSD Nodes for your personal website hosting, game server, or as the home for your startup’s SaaS application, there will probably be a point where you need to take code from your local machine and send it to your server.
There’s an incredible variety of methodologies and applications that can aid in the transfer, along with a number of solid techniques and best practices to go along with each—far too many to discuss in detail here. Even then, we find that individuals and small organizations go through a fairly predictable number of stages along the journey to a solid, replicable deployment strategy.
1. (S)FTP
For better or worse, cPanel has made File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access to VPS’s easier than ever, and it’s often the first solution that individuals and small teams turn to. FTP and its secure variant (SFTP) allow users to transfer large batches of files between two machines, and while the protocol used to be accessed using command-line tools, GUI-based solutions like Filezilla have taken a dominant role.
While (S)FTP is relatively easy to set up, thanks in part to cPanel and other dashboards, it was never really designed to be a secure protocol for regularly deploying code to a remote server. With that in mind, most people move on quickly, and we don't necessarily recommend relying too heavily on FTP.
2. SCP/rsync
Secure Copy (SCP) and rsync are two different programs that aim to do the same thing: copy the contents of a particular folder (or the folder itself) onto a remote machine. They both utilize the SSH to connect to the remote server and send information across the wire securely, which is an added plus over FTP.
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