Before deploying your nopCommerce site, you should prepare for deployment with Part 3!

Let’s start with the Hosting Account Information you get after signing up with Arvixe.

This e-mail will contain your hosting information, such as your Control Panel login, your temporary domain pointer, FTP information, and everything else you need to set up your website.  Use this information to log into your Arvixe Control Panel, and get acquainted with where everything is at. Before we start uploading files, be sure that the domain is set up to use .Net Framework 4.0.

For uploading the compiled solution, we’ll use Filezilla, a free FTP program.  If you haven’t already downloaded and installed it, you’re welcome to substitute your preferred FTP app, and modify steps 2 and 3 for your needs.

If you’ve chosen to continue with FileZilla, open the application, and in the left window, navigate to the folder where you exported your compiled solution from VS2010.  Then, click “SiteManager” in the top left menu, and select “New Site”.

After you’ve selected the “New Site” button, insert the FTP information for your account, which you can confirm in your Arvixe Control Panel, and the server information that’s contained in your setup e-mail. It’s helpful to save these settings by naming them appropriately for the site.

Once you’ve connected to the server, and navigated to the “wwwroot” folder, just select all the files in the local folder, and drag them across to the window for the remote server.  There are quite a lot of files, so it’ll take a bit of time. While that’s completing, let’s go set up the database.

For my purposes, I prefer to use MSSQL, so that is the option I choose under Databases in the Control Panel.  After I have made my selection, I enter a name for the database, and create it.  After that is completed, in the same screen, I create a database user and password.  Be sure to remember all this; you will be inserting this in the setup dialog for nopCommerce, as soon as the file upload is finished.

In your Arvixe e-mail, you will be supplied with a temporary URL to use until your domain is ready for “prime time”. Navigate to that, and it’ll automatically bring up the installation dialog for nopCommerce, just like we did when we first ran our Visual Studio project. After the install is finished, navigate to the home page, log in using the authentication settings you used on setup, and start setting your configuration options in the Admin section.