Setting Up a Web Site

To set up a Web site:

  1. Go to Home > Domains group title menu > Create Domain.
  2. Specify the domain name that was previously registered with a domain name registrar. Leave the www check box selected if you want to allow users to access the site by a common and habitual URL like www.your-domain.com.

    Having the www alias preceding the domain name does not cost anything, and it will allow users to get to the site no matter what they type in their browsers: www.your-domain.com and your-domain.com will both direct users to the site.

  3. If you have previously created a domain template and predefined all hosting features and resource usage allotments (as described in the chapter Simplifying Setup of Web Sites), select the required template from the Use domain template settings menu.
  4. If you have a number of IP addresses to choose from, select the required address from the Assign IP address menu.

    Bear in mind that e-commerce sites need a dedicated IP address (not shared among other sites) to implement Secure Sockets Layer data encryption.

    After your Web site is set up, you will be able to assign another IP address to it, if you have several IP addresses and if you are authorized to perform this operation. Note that after you change a site's IP address, your domain/site will be unreachable and e-mail messages sent to mailboxes under your domain will not reach them until the information about the new IP address is propagated across the DNS system. This can take one or two days.

  5. Select the Mail and DNS check boxes.
  6. Select the Web Site Hosting option to host the Web site on this machine.

    Upon completion of this procedure, your control panel will set up the domain name server on this machine to serve the new domain name and prepare the Web server to serve the new Web site: a new zone file with appropriate resource records will be added to the Domain Name Server's configuration files, a Web space will be created inside the Web server's directory, and necessary user accounts will be created on the server.

    Note: If your site is hosted on another machine, and you wish to set up your control panel's DNS server only to serve the DNS zone for that site, select either Frame forwarding or Standard forwarding option. With standard forwarding, a user is redirected to the site and the actual site's URL is shown in the user's browser, so the user always knows that he or she is redirected to another URL. With frame forwarding, a user is redirected to the site without knowing that the site actually resides at another location. For example: your customer has a free personal web site with his or her Internet Service Provider or a free Web host, and the Web site address is http://www.geocities.com/~myhomepage. The customer purchased a second level domain name www.myname.com and wants you to provide domain forwarding to his Web site. In this case you would normally choose the Frame forwarding service. See the chapter "Serving the Domain Names for Sites Hosted on Other Servers (Domain Forwarding)" for details.

  7. Type in the username and password that will be used for uploading Web site content over FTP and Microsoft FrontPage.
  8. Click Next >>.
  9. Specify the following settings:
  10. Click Next >>.
  11. Review and adjust the following settings as required:
  12. Click Finish.

Now the server is ready to accommodate the new Web site, and you can do the following:

To learn what else you can do with your Web site through the control panel, see Managing Web Sites.

To learn what else you can do with e-mail accounts through the control panel, see Managing E-mail Services.