This guide is intended to provide simple explanations for the operations you need to go through to make use of your web hosting account. eShopHost take no responsibility for any inaccuracies or omissions in this guide. This Guide contains: To Get Your Web Site on the Internet - This is What You Do Creating Your Web Site Your Own Domain Name or an eShopHost Subdomain? The Directory Structure of Your Web Host Account Uploading your files to Your Account on the Web Server To Get Your Web-based Email to Work - This is What You Do Email POP3 Account or Alias Setting up Your Emails on Your Server Setting up Your Email Accounts on Your Own Computer Just click on a link, above, to jump straight to it, or scroll down the page. To Get Your Web Site on the Internet - This is What You Do This is what you do to get your web site on the internet so anybody can access it. Creating Your Web Site You can create your web site using any number of software packages - you can even use Microsoft Word!  How to select and use these packages is beyond the scope of this Guide.  A common and easy to use package is Microsoft FrontPage. The files that you create for your web must be HTML files. Each file is one web page. If you are using, say, Microsoft Word, you need to ‘Save As HTML’. This is the language of the web and web browsers, like Internet Explorer, understand it. Your main file - your site Home page - must be named index.html or index.htm for the web server to recognise it as the page to display when someone requests your web over the internet. Any images that you want to use must be in gif or jpg format, and really ought to be optimised for use on the web (small file size).  You can create or manipulate images for use on the web using any number of software packages.  However, how to select and use these packages is beyond the scope of this Guide. If you consider that perhaps you no longer wish to develop the skills necessary for you create your own web site, you can call upon the services of a web design agency, like us eShopHost Ltd (Contact us), to build your web for you. Your Own Domain Name or an eShopHost Subdomain? Your web address can be your own, that you point to your web space, or you can use a free name that we will set up for you that is ‘attached’ to the eShopHost domain e.g. www.FredsShop.eShopHost.net. We may be unable to give you your choice of a subdomain name if it has already been taken (unlikely!) If you want to use your own web address, you need to buy a domain name and configure it to use the correct name translator - called a DNS or Domain Name Server.  Access from all parts of the internet is usually available within 72 hours.  You can buy a domain name from many suppliers (including eShopHost Ltd (Contact us).  The actual DNS settings you need to use your own domain name are: Primary Name Server: ns1.livedns.co.uk Secondary Name Server: ns2.livedns.co.uk If you use a free name (called a sub-domain), access to your web is available immediately. You can convert to your own domain name at a later date if you wish. You can either do a web-forward from your domain name to your web space on your subdomain - this does not involve any action from eShopHost, and there will be no disturbance to your web - or you can request eShopHost to set up a new web space under your new domain name.  Once you have uploaded your web files and you can access your web over the internet via the new address, we shall delete your previous sub domain web space.  Just let us know if you want to do this - there is no charge! The Directory Structure of Your Web Host Account There are 3 folders at the root level of your web hosting account: htdocs, logfiles and private. Your web files MUST be placed into htdocs folder. There is no web access elsewhere.  There is a sub-folder called cgi-bin.  This is for you to place your server-side scripts in (if any).  Your home page should have a default file name (typically index.html, index.htm, default.html or default.htm) so that the web server can provide that page to a browser typing in your domain name (otherwise the browser will get a 404 error). The private folder can be used by advanced users to hold files which must be secure from access from the web.  Your scripts can read or write to this folder.  So you may place a database file in here for example. It is not possible for a web browser to access this folder. The logfiles folder will be populated by daily logfiles by the web server software.  These log files can be downloaded to your pc using your FTP account and analysed using a software package such as Web Trends, Analog or Web Position Gold.  The use of such analysis packages is beyond the scope of this guide. Log files will be deleted according to how much space they occupy - oldest first.  So if you have a lot of traffic, you may need to download your log files every day, if you want to keep them. Log files identify every activity on your web including information on the source of the web request. Uploading your files to Your Account on the Web Server Once you have created (and tested) your web on your own computer, you just copy the files (HTML pages and images) from your computer to our web server.  This is done using something called FTP - File Transfer Protocol - which is supported by most web software packages, or you can use a specific software package like WS_FTP (you can download this for free, for non-commercial purposes, from www.cnet.com ).  You need to configure it with the details of your FTP server and account. These details will be sent by email to you after your order has been processed.  The directory structure you have used for your web on your own computer will also be created on the web server.  Please ensure your FTP program is configured to place your web files into the correct folder of your web hosting account (see previous section). Test your web site again using your web browser. You can do this immediately the FTP has finished.  You will notice that it is slower.  That is because your web files now have to be remotely ‘served’ and transmitted over the internet and down your modem line to your computer. You will find, however, that the next time you call up a web page it will be much quicker. This is because your internet browser saves the files it fetched earlier and re-uses them (this is the cache). When you update your web site, you only really need to FTP the updated files, although it does no harm to upload the whole site (it will take longer). Just work with your FTP software. Some give you no options whilst some are intelligent enough to only upload the changed files. If you have an accident with your own computer and lose your web site files, you can FTP in the opposite direction and restore the files on your own computer. To Get Your Web-based Email to Work - This is What You Do Email POP3 Account or Alias Each person or function can have their own email box that they can use to collect their emails from - using a password.  These are POP3 accounts.  Use POP3 accounts for separate people. You can also set up email addresses that don’t have an email box as they simply re-direct emails to another specified email address. For example, you could set up which redirects to your personal email account, , say.  These are called forwarders or aliases. If that weren’t enough, you can also have autoresponders - a message that you want to be returned to the sender automatically. For example, you could set up that has an autoresponder message giving details of your club and your web site. You can only have an autoresponder with a POP3 account but you can enable or disable it as required. Setting up Your Emails on Your Server From your internet browser (e.g. Internet Explorer), log onto your personal control panel and set up your email accounts (POP3, aliases and autoresponders as required). There are some defaults already set up for you: root - a default POP3 mailbox - we initially set this to forward to the email address you gave when you ordered your web hosting service nobody - a default forwarder - any email sent to an address that hasn’t been set up will be sent to this alias - we initially set this to forward to the email address you gave when you ordered your web hosting service.  If you don’t want incorrect email to be handled, just clear this forwarder postmaster - a default forwarder - it is standard practice for the email administrator to have the email address of postmaster, so you could get email with this address - we initially set this to forward to the email address you gave when you ordered your web hosting service For each POP3 account you want, just create it, set a password, an autoresponder if required, and if required one or more forwarding email addresses. For email addressed to, say, you can set up a forwarding list of valid emails, separated by semicolons e.g. ; For autoresponders, it is best to create your message in a file on your computer (e.g. autoresponder.doc) and when ready, copy & paste into the autoresponder space for your POP3 account on your control panel. Don’t forget to enable your autoresponder. Put the subject of your autoresponder message on the first line, leave a blank line, then the body of the message. Setting up Your Email Accounts on Your Own Computer From your email program (e.g. Outlook Express) set up the email accounts that you want to send and receive from (POP3).  That’s it, you can send and retrieve emails immediately (or after about 72 hours after you configure your new domain name) However you access the internet at the moment, you need to retain e.g. your internet service provider (ISP) may be BT Internet. We will confirm the details you need to set up your email account, but they will be of the form: POP3 (incoming) hostname: mail.<the domain name> SMTP (outgoing) hostname: <<as provided by your ISP>> Username: <<The full email address>> Password: <<As specified when you set up the POP3 email account on the server>> For example: POP3 (incoming) hostname: mail.FredsShop.eshophost.net SMTP (outgoing) hostname: mail.btinternet.com Username: Password: secretpasswordforsales