Connecting

You must use an FTP program to upload your files to our servers. While your domain is being registered and transfered, you should connect to the IP address contained in your account setup email. Use the username and passwords provided, making sure to put them both in lower case. When you first connect, you will be in the /home/yourusername/ftp/ directory which is where you should upload files for your website. They will appear at www.youdomain.com when your domain is active. The www directory is a mirror of this, ftp actually is a link to it. It does not matter which you upload to.

The Index Page

The filename of your home page should be index.htm or index.html.

The webserver will automatically send the file at path /home/yourdomain/ftp/index.htm when a browser specifies www.yourdomain.com. This is the root of your domain.

When your account is set up, there will be an index.html page already installed. This just tells anyone accessing your domain that your site is under construction and will be available soon. You will replace this file in the www directory with one of your own creation. If you wish to use any of the cgi features we provide that use Server Side Includes (SSI), you must name your page with the .sht or .shtm or .shtml extension. You can put an index.htm file in any subdirectory that you wish, and it will be the default page served when you don't want your visitors to have to type a full page URL reference, for example, http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever instead of http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever/page.htm, or http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever.htm.

FTP Access

Now that we know where the files have to be located in order to be visible from the Internet, just how do we put the files there? There are several ways, depending on your computer system. For the Macintosh, a program called "Fetch" is used. Microsoft Windows systems use "WS_FTP." Look further in this manual for detailed instructions on each of these programs. See http://www.ipswitch.com for WS_FTP.