You have just opened a web hosting account here at HostRocket. This is your first web hosting account and you know little to nothing about creating and publishing a web site. To you HTML, FTP, and PHP are an alphabet soup of meaningless letters arranged at random. If all of the above are true don't worry, you're in the right place...this FAQ entry was written just for you!
Your Very First (Really, Really Simple) Basic Web Page
At this point the test URL for your account (and/or your domain name if it has already resolved) is bringing you to the default directory list showing a mostly empty waiting to be filled hosting account containing only a lonely cgi-bin directory and perhaps one or two other items. The first thing you will likely want to do both for cosmetic reasons as well as the educational value will be to get rid of this ugly directory list by putting your own index page in place.
If you already know a little HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or if you are using a web publishing program or WYSIWYG HTML editor you can feel free to get as fancy as you are capable of in creating your first page, however proceeding with the assumption that you don't know the first thing about web authoring you can do the following to create the simplest index page possible:
- Open Windows NotePad or a similar plain text editor
- Type the words "Under construction" or similar
- Click File > Click Save As
- Pull down the Save in drop down menu and choose Desktop
- As the file name type "index.html" (all lower case, with the quotes)
- Click the Save button
You have just created your very first web page. To confirm your successful completion of the task you may double-click on the index or index.html icon you should now see on your Desktop. Your default web browser should open and display the fruits of your labor. It may not qualify as art, but it's a start and it will serve fine to announce your presence on the web while you learn enough to upload your first "real" web page.
The next part of this exercise is to publish this temporary index page to the web. While there are a variety of different web publishing tools and FTP clients available and you will likely want to take advantage of one of them down the road at this point we'll stick to the tools on hand and upload your creation using the File Manager which is available in your cPanel account.
- Login to your cPanel
- Click on the File Manager icon
- Find the listing for public_html and click on the folder icon next to it
- Click the Upload Files link
- Click the first Browse... button
- A Choose File window should appear with a Windows Explorer style interface. Pull down the Look In drop down menu and choose Desktop, which should appear at the very top of the list
- Find the index.html file you created (which may appear as just "index") and Double-Click on it
- After the Choose File dialog closes click on the Upload button
- In the frame on the left side of the File Manager window you should see "upload succeeded"
Congratulations! You are now officially a webmaster. To view your index page enter your test URL (or your domain name if it's already in working order) into a web browser.
Note: If after uploading your temporary index page you still see the directory listing when you visit your test URL or domain name the odds are that you are looking at an older copy of the page which is cached locally on your hard drive. Try clicking the Refresh button on your browser's toolbar, and if that doesn't work try purging your browser cache and try again.
