This document covers the following topics:

• Your temporary index page
• Uploading your site
• Contents of your home directory

Your Temporary Index Page

You will be able to access your Web site right after you register your account. To do this, you will have to use an instant domain alias . Instant Domain Alias is an additional web address which lets you access your site during the first several hours after the domain name registration, the time when the site is yet unavailable at the newly registered domain. Over the next few days DNS servers all across the Internet will update themselves with your new site name. Once that happens, you will be able to access your site at the domain you have registered.

The moment your account is registered, a temporary index page is added to your site's directory. It will look like this:

It will be there until you upload your site and replace it with your own index page (e.g. yoursite/sh_vs_support_index.html). Meanwhile, from this temporary page you can:

• administer your account. Enter your control panel login and password into "Login to your Control Panel". This login and password are e-mailed to you at the address you specified at signup. Use the Control Panel to view your bills, change your contact/billing information, change passwords, get more disk space, report problems to the technical support staff and much, much more.
  
• create a web site in a matter of minutes right from your browser. Use the option "Launch Site Builder". Initially, the password to log into the site builder is the same as that for the control panel.
  

Uploading Your Site

You have two alternative ways to upload your site to the server:

• Using PC based FTP agents, such as CuteFTP or SmartFTP;
• Using the built-in web-based FTP agent. (See WebShell for details).

Important: Don't upload your site to the root of your user directory! See below for the explanation.

After you set up a new account, Control Panel will create several default subdirectories. Subdirectories' number and names may differ depending on the plan that you sign up for, yet some of them are common for any Unix or Windows plan. Here are some of the folders in your home directory that may not be deleted. Depending on your account configuration, these can be:

• The directories that contain your sites. The name of the directory is the same as your site's domain name. If you have more than one site, you will have several such directories. These are the directories where you will upload your .html files or any other files that you want to make accessible from the Internet. Each of these directories may contain /webalizer or /modlogan directories. Do not delete either the directories containing your site (e.g.www.domain.com) or directories containing logfile analyzers, Webalizer and ModLogAn (e.g. /webalizer or /modlogan); your site is too valuable to lose it at a touch of a button.
• The Logs directory. It contains directories for every site with transfer log enabled. Each such directory contains its own set of log files that are required to write and read the data about all visits to your sites. Deleting Logs directories will cause the loss of the web statistics accumulated in the course of your site's operation. Click here for more on web statistics.
• The Virtual FTP directory. Its name is the dedicated IP address. This directory is created when you enable Virtual FTP Server, and is used by Anonymous FTP users after you enable Anonymous FTP Access. There are as many such directories as dedicated IP addresses. Deleting FTP directories will cause incorrect operation of Virtual FTP, deleting files in these directories will not impact FTP functioning, but your FTP users will lose any files stored in these folders. Click here for more on Virtual FTP.
• The subdomain directories. When creating new subdomains, you create a directory for each of them with the subdomain name as the directory name. Deleting directories containing the newly-created subdomains will result in the incorrect operation (Error message 404 "File not found" will appear every time anyone attempts to access the subdomain). Click here to read on how to create subdomains.
• The ssl.conf directory. This directory stores SSLpairs for all encrypted sites. Deleting ssl.conf directory will result in incorrect SSL operation.

Warning: It is undesirable to delete ANY of default directories in your root directory. As a rule of thumb, you may delete the directories and files that you have uploaded yourselves or that have been uploaded by any of your Virtual FTP and Anonymous FTP users. Deleting any other above-mentioned folders will cause the malfunctions of your account.