Getting Started
 

When you first opened your account you received an e-mail with your account information.  This e-mail provides you with everything you need to access and publish to your new web account.  

There is a default web page placed in your web folder, which you can also use as a login page, until you overwrite the page with your web site index.html page.  You can always login to your control through our main site.

At any time, you can open a support ticket through your control panel as well.  This is the way we address all support issues.  We can respond quickly and have the ability to assign the best support representative to your inquiry while tracking and measuring our levels of support.
 

Interfaces in the Control Panel

As development always continues on our control panel, we try to offer the most flexibility to our users.  You will see you have the option to more than one type of "look and feel" in the control panel.  Most of the functionality is identical across all interfaces, regardless of the look.  Please pay close attention to the text links and function names as you may see different icons for the same feature depending on the skin - or interface look you have selected.
 

Your Temporary Index Page (Home page)

You will be able to access your Web site once you register your account. To do this, you will have to use an instant domain alias that is created automatically for you.  You should have received it in the initial welcome e-mail. 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. (see Domain Names) Over the next few days Domain Name Servers (DNS) 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: (coloring may vary)

It will be there until you upload your site and replace it with your own index page (i.e.  www.yourcompany.com/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

Whenever possible, upload your site using the utilities that come with your web-site development software. For instance, if you made your site with SiteStudio, FrontPage or Dreamweaver, use their integrated web publishing tools. If you made your site with simple text editors, or if your site-building software does not have a publishing utility, use freestanding FTP clients, such as CuteFTP, SmartFTP, or the built-in web-based FTP agent.

Please note that site publishing tools do not remove your old web content from the server. For instance, if you used SiteStudio to upload a site with 15 pages and later you published an updated 7 page version of this site, your directory on the server will have all the new pages and the old pages that haven't been overwritten. If you publish many versions of the website, the site may become cluttered with old files. Warning: If you have a complete website, be careful not to overwrite it with a publish command.

Do not upload your site to the root of your user directory! Instead, put it to the specific directory. See below for more information. Click to see more about FTP information
 

Contents of Your Home Directory

Your home directory contains several default subdirectories or sub folders. Their number and names will differ depending on your plan, yet some of them are common for all plans. It is a feature of our hosting automation system to let you have multiple domain names under your one login account and control panel.

You will always have a "root" directory, and each domain name you have will have a separate subdirectory in the main web folder. Here are some of the directories that are automatically created and may not be deleted: (Some hosting accounts may have limited feature sets and some may not be viewable.  Please contact us if you need to upgrade your account)
 

  • Directories that contain your sites. Each of your sites is put in a separate directory. 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 their own /webalizer or /modlogan directories. Do not delete either of these directories! Your site is too valuable to lose 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 the Logs directory will cause the loss of the web statistics accumulated in the course of your site 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 can be accessed by virtual FTP users to list and download its content. There are as many such directories as dedicated IP addresses. Deleting Virtual FTP directories will cause incorrect operation of Virtual FTP. However, you may harmlessly delete individual files in these directories. Click here for more on Virtual FTP.

  • The subdomain directories. When you make a subdomain, a new directory is created with the subdomain name as the directory name. If you delete a subdomain directory, internet visitors will get the 404 "File not found" error when attempting to access the subdomain. Click here to read on how to create subdomains.

  • The ssl.conf directory. This directory stores SSL pairs for all encrypted sites. Deleting the ssl.conf directory will result in incorrect SSL operation.
 

Warning: Do not delete ANY default directories in your root directory, as this will cause malfunctions of your account. As a rule of thumb, you may delete only directories and files you have uploaded yourselves or that have been uploaded by any of your Virtual FTP and Anonymous FTP users.
 
 

***IMPORTANT***

You will have the option to select a number of different interfaces for your control panel.  Depending on the servers where your plans reside, you may see different options in the interface.  The differences are mainly with the look and feel, but most options have similar text links.  With the Xpressia view, there is a different process for setting up e-mail accounts and a few other features that will be discussed throughout the Help file system.