What exactly are you planning to distribute? The entire app, and updates - ie. installers/patches? If so you can just host the files on any static Web site - no programming needed for this to work.

As Hank pointed out, if you need security to access content, then things get more complicated, but if that's the case I think the better scenario is to add passwords or registration keys to your installer or your application to enforce licensing.

I distribute all my products on the Web. They are just files that live on my Web server that I update via FTP access - ie. I'm the only one that needs FTP access, everybody else sees HTTP links from the Web server which is only serving files from folder. All products can be downloaded by anybody. The installers include passwords to unpack registered versions, or applications themselves include registration logic to activate the application or specific features. IOW no need to have any of that 'registration logic' run a dynamic Web server.

You can host a Web site pretty cheaply especially if all you need is static file serving - there are shared hosting providers that provide ready made Web sites that you just dump files into via FTP. This can be as cheap as a few dollars a month. If you don't need anything else - ie. only a place to park your files for download - then you literally just FTP up the files to the server and then point people at the HTTP url to the download.

+++ Rick ---


>Howdy and grand rising to all,
>
>Wanted to throw this out there: I am contemplating providing installation files and updates to an application via ftp from a central website directory. Has anyone any experience with this and can provide pros and cons to this approach.
>
>I do not have experience with web development enough in order to create the application web based.