New hosting account. First steps.

The confirmation email

After signing up, you will receive a confirmation email with important information related to your account. Beside account login details you will find useful links to help pages and tutorials about how to setup different things. You will need to look for the following information:

The POP3 and SMTP information is needed for setting up the email client software (e.g. Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.) or for setting up website's automated email sending scripts (if there are any).

This is useful information for the website's developers. When using web programming languages and scripts, sometimes, for the scripts to work, the programmers need to set a path to where the script is installed.

You will need this kind on information if you have registered your domain name with someone else than the hosting company.

Getting Your Site Online

Now that you have access to your account there are two more steps to be done. The first one is to actually copy the website's files to the hosting server and the second one is to make sure that the domain name "points" to the same server.

Uploading files. FTP Transfer.
In order for your pages to be viewed on the internet, you need to move them on the hosting server, usually in a directory called "public_html" (some web hosts might name the directory differently; for consistency reasons we will refer to it from now on as /public_html). This directory might have some files and folders in it. These files/folders are necessary in order for your account to function properly and you should not delete them unless you know exactly what you are doing. FTP is a popular method for uploading your site, and involves copying the files from your computer to the hosting computer. To copy the files you need a FTP client. There are many free FTP clients out there; we recommend the open-source FileZilla FTP client (for Windows you need to download the _win32-setup.exe version). If you need help installing and using a FTP client, please read our FTP transfer tutorial.

When copying the web pages make sure that your first page (the opening page) of your website is named "index.html" or "index.htm" and that you overwrite the existing index.htm(l) page. If the server is PHP enabled, you can also name the opening page "index.php", but in this case make sure you delete the .htm index file.

View Your Website.
If you did not order the domain name along side with the hosting package, you need to update the name servers with the information provided in the domain name instructions section of the welcome email. It is not a complicated procedure; usually the host provides a link with a video or a written tutorial. If you have registered with GoDaddy.com, you can find a tutorial about changing name servers here. You must visit your registrar's website to complete this action.

As explained in the Choosing a Domain Name article, the association domain name - IP is stored on DNS, domain name servers. It takes up to 72 hours for your domain changes to reach all the world's DNS servers. That's why, in the first hours, your website will not be available by its name (you can test whether or not the domain name - IP association has propagated by entering the website name in your browser's address bar). To overcome this issue, the web host usually assigns a temporary URL or IP address (provided in the welcome email) until the propagation is complete. When first connecting to the hosting server, to transfer the files via FTP, you will use this temporary name as the domain name, instead of the domain name of the website.

Spiders and Robots.
Although the title suggests a sci-fi horror movie, when relating to websites, "spiders" refer to search engines' automated programs, which crawl Internet in search for new websites, new pages and new content. And that is a good thing because this is how the search engines like Google, Yahoo! etc. get to know about your website. So, the last step after copying the files and changing the name servers is to create a robots.txt file that will set access rules for these robots. When creating this file use a simple text editor (like Notepad). It should be an ASCII-encoded text file (.txt extension), and the filename should be lowercase.

The robots.txt file uses two rules:

• User-Agent: the robot the following rule applies to
• Dissalow: the pages/folders you want to block

A user-agent is a specific search engine robot. For example one of Google's user agents is called Googlebot. By creating multiple Disallow and User-Agents lines, you can create as many rules as you want.

To apply the rule to Google's robot use:

To apply the rule to all bots use the * (asterisk):

To block the entire site, use a forward slash.

To block an entire folder, follow the directory name with a forward slash.

To block a specific web page, name the page:

Let's say for example, that you have in your /public_html, a directory (named /documents) where you keep some reports that are available on the website, but you don't want them to appear in search engines results (no matter the search engine).
Open a text editor (Notepad in Windows) and write the following:

Save the new file as robots.txt and then upload it into the /public_html folder on the hosting server. The robots will index content from every file of your website except the files found in the /documents folder.