Hosting site before its ready

[AVS]

Is it possible to get our site hosted before its ready as we need to show someone how it works and to do a test order etc before it goes live? Ideally so it is password protected so no one else can view it. Can anyone help us with this or make any suggestions?
Thanks

[Chunkford]

Actinic offer trial hosting. Give that a go

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=45510

[Duncan Rounding]

You can load it up in test mode or to a test domain. Just put a robots.txt file in the root of the site to stop it being indexed. I doubt you would need to password protect it - if no one knows the URL they won't know it exists anyway - at least for the time it takes to check it out.

[AVS]

Site hoting

Thanks to both of you!

[Rich Brady]

I'd get it hosted as soon as you can and edit it whilst it's live. If this is a new site it's going to take time for search engines to find you, I'd use this time for that.

Once you've finished tinkering, Google and the like already know about you. Otherwise it could be several months after you "launch" before you appear in a search result.

[laura]

Hanna, I've used this company previously because they offer a free service on a limited scale with no commitment.

http://www.5quidhost.co.uk/hosting.php

It is then easy to move up to a paid package if the tests work out and you like their services.

Good luck

Laura

[pinbrook]

I agree with most of the comments with a couple of exceptions.

Can we assume the domain in question already has a site on it - thus you could upload there as long as the test remains hidden?

if so you can still use the same hosting space - either use a subdomain within it or just use a sub folder. If you go with this option use the robots.txt to disallow access to the test site.

if its a brand new site on a brand new domain - get yourself sorted with hosting now. Again if you dont want the test site on the live domain choose a host that has the facility for a test domain.

I am not sure I would advocate allowing spiders into a test site as it can then take a while after the site is live to get the content changed (esp if it has been deep crawled and you change page names - you may end up having to remove URLs), but i would allow spiders in when it is 90% ready just to speed up the process of getting indexed.

Somewhere in the back of my mind i think using password protection can sometimes foul up an actinic site - thus i'd go for the temp domain and disallow access via robots.

[AVS]

Thanks for all replies. How do we use the robots.txt to disallow site access?

[AndyBorrett]

Easiest way is to search for robots.txt and copy an example