For a task as important as building an online e-commerce site, it is necessary that you spend a lot of time considering your options, and developing and testing your site. Since it is not really feasible to do this sort of work on the live site, you need to employ a development machine to aid you. Because of this, the topic of deployment is an important one in the overall scheme of things because it is deployment that actually links your finished development to the live store that customers can use.
This chapter outlined a solid process for preparing for deployment, followed by several of the most common methods for transferring files. Of course, it was also necessary to set up a new database on the host site, but this should be relatively easy because any good host should make the task fairly simple by providing a tool like phpMyAdmin to work with the database.
Hopefully you came to realize that the deployment process itself is not particularly complex for an osCommerce site, since...