DRH Internet Inc.
Website hosting technical support library
The temporary domain name

In your account setup you received a temporary domain name. This is to allow you to access your account while you are waiting on the domain name registration or transfer.

A temporary domain name will be in the form:

    yourdomain.com.tempdomain.net
(We use .com in this example as we do elsewhere to represent whatever top level domain truly applies.) So you can access your account at:
    http://yourdomain.com.tempdomain.net/
You can not however send e-mail to your temporary domain name.

You may optionally add the common "www" prefix to your temporary domain name.

Notice that your full domain name is pre-pended to "tempdomain.net" to make your temporary domain name. The shortened form, yourname.tempdomain.net will not work.

The temporary domain name is intended to be just that: temporary. Your temporary domain name will expire three days after your domain name is properly setup. If your domain name is not properly setup, the temporary domain name will expire in ten days.

Use of the prefix www

Let us again assume that your full domain name is "yourname.com". Folks can access your web site from their browsers with either of the following URLs:

    yourname.com
    www.yourname.com
In other words, we have setup your account so that people can access it with or without the common prefix of www.

On the other hand, e-mail must be directed only to account@yourname.com. E-mail that is sent to account@www.yourname.com will never reach you.

We cannot leave this topic without pointing out that the formal URLs for your web site are actually the following (and notice the trailing slashes):

    http://yourname.com/
    http://www.yourname.com/
Any browser converts short URLs to formal URLs, but it will be helpful for you to keep in mind the distinction.

Your directories and the files which populate them

On our servers you have a home directory, which we assigned to you and created as part of setting up your account. You have control of the files in your home directory and in any directories you create in it. It is by uploading files into these directories that you will create your web site. You will upload files via FTP (not to be confused with anonymous FTP) (how to FTP).

Any FTP session starts in your home directory. Your home directory corresponds to the root of your website, which means, for example, that a file named "egg.html" in your home directory can be accessed (via any browser) at http://www.yourname.com/egg.html.

The following files will exist in your home directory by default:

.bash_logout      - part of your unix account, do not delete
.bash_profile - part of your unix account, do not delete
.bashrc - part of your unix account, do not delete
.domains - raw mail forwarding control file, do not delete
.qmail-default - mail forwarding mechanism, do not delete
.screenrc - part of your unix account, you may delete if you want
index.html - default welcome page, please replace with your own page
logs/ - your logs directory, do not delete

Your specific FTP software may not show you the files beginning with dots, such as .bashrc since they are really hidden files under UNIX.

Inside of the logs directory you have the following files:

error.log      - error log for the day
error.log2 - archived error log
oldsummaries/ - directory containing archived error summaries
transfer.log - web transfer log for the day
transfer.log2 - web transfer log for the month
usage.html - web usage summary for the month

Making your files visible on the web

The procedure for making your files visible on the web is really easy: you upload them. Since your home directory is the root of your website, a file hello.html uploaded to your home directory can be accessed by http://www.yourname.com/hello.html.

But what file is used for a request to http://www.yourname.com/ where no file is specified? This request names a directory rather than a file. The way our servers handle this request is a behavior of Apache, which is the web server software we use. Apache calls this behavior DirectoryIndex, and it works as follows.

When you specify the URL http://www.yourname.com/ you are literally specifying that you want to see your home directory. Historically, this request was handled by producing a directory listing, i.e., an index of all the files and directories in the home directory. But this is generally not what you want your users to see. So Apache (and other web servers) responds by serving a specific file in the directory, called a DirectoryIndex file, if it exists. Apache will search for your DirectoryIndex file under several different names, which are listed below in the order that Apache searches. Apache will serve whichever file it finds first.

    index.html
     home.html
    index.htm
     home.htm
    index.shtml
     home.shtml
    index.shtm
     home.shtm
    index.cgi
     home.cgi
    index.php3
     home.php3
We have included both the "index" and "home" names for pages to be directory indexs and the most common extensions for content.

These files are matched in this order so if a index.html file and a home.shtm file are in the same directory, the index.html file will be served as the directory index.

Organizing your website

Most people naturally organize their site using directories, and this is a good idea. When you use directories and DirectoryIndex documents you can do really neat things, such as making your most important documents accessable using shorter URL's.

It is a good idea to break the sections of your site into directories. If your site becomes moderately large, this can be a very good idea, because having hundreds of files in your home directory can become unwiedly and becomes inefficient in the server.

Also, when you have a section that is in a directory and you have a directory index file for that section, the URL is http://www.yourname.com/section as opposed to http://www.yourname.com/section.html. This is a slightly smaller amount of text to write, which is useful if you place the URL in any advertising or tell people about it on the phone.

Web server information

Each account is assigned to a particular server. However, there is no real reason that you need to know what server your account is on, because you always access your account using your domain name.