 | What is Hosting? |  |
 | Web sites are hosted, or stored, on a special computer called a server. The server, or host computer, allows internet surfers from around the world to reach your site when they put in your domain address www.yourdomain.com. Hosting companies charge a rental fee for the service of storing your web site and letting web site visitor traffic flow through their computers to get to the information on your site.
The host computers are set up so that when someone types in your domain name (www.yourdomain.com), the address will follow a route from computer to computer until it reaches your host computer and your web site. Then the internet surfer will be able to browse through your web site. Hosting companies usually require that you own your own domain name in order to host with them. If you don't have a domain name, most hosting companies will help you purchase one.
Q: My Internet Service Provider (ISP) gives me a web site for free. So, |
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| Switching Hosting Companies and Transferring Domains | |
| Switching hosting companies is easy. First you must own a domain name (www.yourdomain.com) AND host it with another web hosting company. Immediately after getting your site and billing information, we will begin the process of switching you over to host your site on our computers.
Note: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for uploading a copy of your existing site to our servers. We do not transfer the actual files, only the domain name. So, before you make the switch, be sure to copy your site files onto disk so you can upload it to our servers. (We do offer a package to Manage My Transfer where for an $85 fee we take care of everything for you.)
Once you cancel service with your old hosting company, you may have problems retrieving the files, keep this in mind as you transfer to Live Oak Hosting. However, if you plan on starting from scratch on our servers, this should not be a problem.
The switch normally takes 2 to 3 days but can ta |
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| Publishing Your Web Page | |
| After you create your website, you will need to upload the files to the server. The easiest way to do this is to use an FTP client software such as WS_FTP (Windows) or Fetch (Macintosh). There are many other free downloadable FTP clients from the internet.
You will upload your files to the /httpdocs/ directory within your domain. This is where your Index.html file should go. All other subdirectories will also need to be uploaded in here.
NOTE: You will not need to reference the /httpdocs/ directory in your links or graphic references.
Open your FTP client software.
Login using your ftp username and password to ftp.yourdomain.com.
Upload all files and graphics associated with your website to the server -- this includes keeping them all in the appropriate subdirectories to keep links and graphic references in tact.
Check you work by |
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| Previewing Web Site in Plesk |  |
| In many cases it is necessary to view a website before it goes live.
In a web browser go to www.yourdomain.com:8443. Login and click into the domain.
Click the Site Preview icon under Hosting. This enables the site to be previewed before going live on Live Oaks servers.
Please bear in mind that this only works if you use relative path names in your links (./dir/filename.html). If you use absolute pathnames (http://www.yourdomain.com/dir/filename.html) it will try to link to the live site and you will not be able to test.
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| Creating Secondary FTP Accounts in Plesk | |
| Depending upon what you want to do with the FTP account, will determine how and where you set up this new account. Choose from one of the following options:
Create a directory to transfer files between parties. The files uploaded into this account do not necessarily need to be available to view in a web page, but work well when files are too large to send via email or need to be accessed by many different people from various locations.
Create a subdomain with a separate FTP account. If you would like a new site section without access to the main site and allows for site access through a browser.
Create a protected directory that is only accessible to a single FTP account. Allows file access to these directories via ftp and a browser, however, all content is password protected.
Create a Transfer D |
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