We recently got the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription at work, and I wanted to check out their web hosting plan – one of the features is hosting for up to five websites.

Step 1: Creating a Website

I’ve never hosted a website with Adobe (or, more specifically, Business Catalyst), so I wasn’t sure where to start.  I looked around the website, and eventually found that there are three ways to create a website:

• Muse: an Adobe program for non-programmers to create websites
• Dreamweaver: an Adobe program for programmers to create websites (last time I used this was maybe 12 years ago)
• BusinessCatalyst.com: an online management tool for websites

The documentation I read on Adobe.com indicated that even if I go the Muse or Dreamweaver route, I’ll eventually need to use BusinessCatalyst to manage my site for things such as DNS, so I went to BusinessCatalyst.com.  Also, I didn’t really feel like installing Muse or Dreamweaver, as I have no intention of using either of those programs (I like to use Visual Studio for those types of tasks).

Well, turns out that creating my website with BusinessCatalyst.com was a mistake. Creative Cloud subscriptions come with five webBasic websites. These types of websites can be created from Muse (or possibly Dreamweaver).  However, creating from BusinessCatalyst.com will create a webCommerce site. I noticed the problem when I tried to promote my site to live. When clicking the “Upgrade” button, it started asking for my credit card info. After a chat with their CSR, my site was “downgraded” to webBasic and I was able to push the site to live.

Step 2: DNS – Creating a Subdomain

I did not want to move my website to Business Catalyst. What I wanted was a place to store files on the Adobe Cloud, while keeping my website where it was.  To do that, I wanted a subdomain, images.bloodforge.com, to be hosted on Adobe’s cloud. Everything else with bloodforge.com would remain where it was.

The first step is to go to the administration section of the website created in Step 1 above, clicking on Manage Site-> Site Settings –> Site Domains. Click on “New Domain” button on the top of the page, and configure the domain. In the “Domain” field, enter the full domain name of your site. So, in my example, I entered “images.bloodforge.com”, without the quotes. Select “Use an external DNS server” radio button option, and copy the IP address listed. You will need this in the next step.  Click on the “Save” button.

Now that you have the IP address of your site, log into the DNS manager of your current website (which in my case was Arvixe, but it could just as well have been GoDaddy or something similar.  You will need to create an “A” record for your domain, and point it to the IP address you just copied from BusinessCatalyst when creating your domain. So, in my example, I created an “A” record for “bloodforge.com” with a name of “images”, and pointed it to the correct IP address.

At this point, you should be able to go to the domain you just created. Type the full domain (in my case, images.bloodforge.com) into your browser and you should now be at the BusinessCatalyst website.

Step 3: FTP files to your Adobe/Business Catalyst website

You’ll need to obtain the FTP settings for your website from BusinessCatalyst. Log into the admin section of the website created in Step 1, and go to “ManageSite” –> “Site Manager” –> “File Manager”, and click on the “Upload Files” button at the top of the page. There should be a Tip on this page, and if you click on the “See Details” button, it will show you the details for your FTP login info. In my case, it was:

• host: images.bloodforge.com
• username: images.bloodforge.com/{Business Catalyst username}
• password: {Business Catalyst password}

I use FileZilla to FTP, and I entered in the information above. I was rather disappointed that BusinessCatalyst used standard FTP with plain text encryption. Doesn’t seem very secure, but it is what it is.

I was able to upload “.aspx” pages to the site, however, it did not execute. Seems like the handler for the file types is disabled. However, other files, such as images, serve up just fine. One thing to keep in mind is that if you upload HTML files, they will not be exactly the same when you access them with a browser. BusinessCatalyst adds some of their own stuff into your files.