Starting with Your Account
This document covers the following topics:
Your Temporary Index Page
You will be able to access your Web site right after you register your
account. To do this, you will have to use an instant domain alias . Instant
Domain Alias is an additional web address which lets you access your site
during the first several hours after the domain name registration, the
time when the site is yet unavailable at the newly registered domain.
Over the next few days DNS servers all across the Internet will update
themselves with your new site name. Once that happens, you will be able
to access your site at the domain you have registered.
The moment your account is registered, a temporary index page is added
to your site's directory. It will look like this:
It will be there until you upload your site and replace it with your
own index page (e.g. yoursite/index.html). Meanwhile, from this
temporary page you can:
- administer your account. Enter your control panel login and password
into "Login to your Control Panel". This login and
password are e-mailed to you at the address you specified at signup.
Use the Control Panel to view your bills, change your contact/billing
information, change passwords, get more disk space, report problems
to the technical support staff and much, much more.
- create a web site in a matter of minutes right from your browser.
Use the option "Launch Site Builder". Initially, the
password to log into the site builder is the same as that for the control
panel.
Uploading Your Site
You have two alternative ways to upload your site to the server:
- Using PC based FTP agents, such as CuteFTP or SmartFTP;
- Using the built-in web-based FTP agent. (See WebShell for details).
Important: Don't upload your site to the root of your user directory!
See below for the explanation.
Contents of Your Home Directory
After you set up a new account, Control Panel will create several default
subdirectories. Subdirectories' number and names may differ depending
on the plan that you sign up for, yet some of them are common for any
Unix or Windows plan. Here are some of the folders in your home directory
that may not be deleted. Depending on your account configuration, these
can be:
- The directories that contain your sites. The name of the directory
is the same as your site's domain name. If you have more than one site,
you will have several such directories. These are the directories where
you will upload your .html files or any other files that you want to
make accessible from the Internet. Each of these directories may contain
/webalizer or /modlogan directories. Do not delete either
the directories containing your site (e.g.www.domain.com) or
directories containing logfile
analyzers, Webalizer and ModLogAn (e.g. /webalizer or /modlogan);
your site is too valuable to lose it at a touch of a button.
- The Logs directory. It contains directories for every site
with transfer log enabled. Each such directory contains its own set
of log files that are required to write and read the data about all
visits to your sites. Deleting Logs directories will cause the loss
of the web statistics accumulated in the course of your site's operation.
Click here for more on web
statistics.
- The Virtual FTP directory. Its name is the dedicated IP address.
This directory is created when you enable Virtual FTP Server, and is
used by Anonymous FTP users after you enable Anonymous FTP Access. There
are as many such directories as dedicated IP addresses. Deleting
FTP directories will cause incorrect operation of Virtual FTP, deleting
files in these directories will not impact FTP functioning, but your
FTP users will lose any files stored in these folders. Click here for more on Virtual FTP.
- The subdomain directories. When creating new subdomains, you
create a directory for each of them with the subdomain name as the directory
name. Deleting directories containing the newly-created subdomains
will result in the incorrect operation (Error message 404 "File
not found" will appear every time anyone attempts to access the subdomain).
Click here to read on how to create
subdomains.
- The ssl.conf directory. This directory stores SSLpairs for
all encrypted sites. Deleting ssl.conf directory will result in incorrect
SSL operation.
Warning: It is undesirable to delete ANY of default directories
in your root directory. As a rule of thumb, you may delete the directories
and files that you have uploaded yourselves or that have been uploaded
by any of your Virtual FTP and Anonymous FTP users. Deleting any other
above-mentioned folders will cause the malfunctions of your account.
