Help Page

This, and other help pages were created to help answer questions you may have regarding our website, hosting plans, or the ISPConfig control panel. If you are relatively new to the web business, the process can leave many unanswered questions. This page was created to help answer questions you may have regarding hosting a website. It starts with the basics and assumes nothing.

If you are reasonably comfortable with hosting plans and still have questions, you may try viewing our Frequently Asked Questions page. Alternately, if you're an old pro and just want answers regarding our ISPConfig control panel, it is available on line as a PDF file located here, or the ISPConfig manual is also available after login to the ISPConfig Control Panel system.

Building a Website

Let's suppose Mary has a flower shop and she decided she wants to build her own Website. She sat in front of her computer, along with her book on Website Design and hammered out a pretty nice looking website. 'Problem is, she's the only one that can see it. She now need to get the thing public so the whole world can see it. Okay, now what?

Choosing a Name

The next step for Mary is to choose a name for her Website. This Website name is referred to as the domain name. Domain names can be purchased many places, with varying prices. We generally use the services of GoDaddy.com for this purpose. GoDaddy charges approximately $10.00 per year, and we find their prices to be very competitive. If you sign up for our Web Hosting service here at Sitejibe and you have not yet purchased your domain name, we will be happy to take care of this for you.

Purchase Server Space

Mary tried several names before she found one that she liked and one that was available. Once the domain name has been purchased it's time for Mary to buy some server space. This is where we come in. We provide the Web Hosting Server. This "server" is not much different than any other computer, with a few exceptions. First off, this computer is hooked up to a very fast connection, and secondly, the computer has a special program loaded on it called coincidentally a "server".

Pointing the domain name

After purchasing one of our hosting plans, Mary receives an email from us providing her with the necessary information to get her Website online. One very important piece of information sent, is the Internet Protocol number (or IP address) of the server. You can think of this number as the formal address of Mary's Website. With this IP number in hand, Mary now treks back to GoDaddy where she purchased her domain name, and points her domain name at this IP number. Once again, we would be happy to take care of this for you.

If Mary were to point her browser to the newly purchased domain name, she can expect to see a generic page saying, "Welcome to your new home in cyberspace," or something to that effect. Mary now needs to upload her web pages onto the server.

Uploading files

Transferring files onto the server can be accomplished in a couple of ways. Let's explore two methods here.

The most common method used for placing files onto the server's computer is to FTP them. What? FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It's a fancy way of saying "file transfer" (or transferring files). FTP involves installing a small program on your computer to upload files to the server. Three programs come to mind that will accomplish the task. Two are free, the other is not. A company called CuteFTP carries a small program called Core_FTP. You can find it here. This little program is free and works well. Another free program is called FileZilla. I'm not going to supply the link here because I was not able to get the program to work. Now I'll be the first to admit I can at times, be a little impatient, but the damn thing didn't work! Maybe you will have better luck! The other program is called WS_FTP Professional. This program can be found here. At the time of printing this page, WS_FTP Pro was priced at $54.95. Okay, this is the program I use but when I purchased it it was priced much less, and to be brutally honest, I can't see spending ANY money for a FTP program when Core_FTP works great and costs nothing.

The second method is to use the ISPConfig's control panel to upload the web pages to the server. This control panel is included with your purchase of server space from Sitejibe. There is a File Transfer Protocol built into the control panel. To access this feature, log into the ISPConfig control panel and click the ISP feature listed across the top of the page. Login will require your user name and password which will be provided in our introductory email. The FTP program works okay, but I don't like it! It requires that all of your editing be done on your home computer and then uploading the files to the server. Editing web files in this way is a little foreign to me.

After your pages have been uploaded to the server it's necessary to tell the server which page should be loaded first. This of course, would be your "home" page. Most servers, however, are configured to look for a page called index.html or index.php or index(something). Once you change the file name of your home page to index.html you should be able to see your website.

Reaping the Rewards

The above steps are a brief tutorial to building a web presence. It certainly doesn't cover everything but should get you started on your way to becoming a master of your domain!