Setting Up Hosting Account for a Web Site

To host a new Web site:

  1. To host a Web site for your own organization, on your Home page, open the Domains group title menu, and click Create Domain. To host a Web site for one of your customers, click Clients, click the customer's name, and in the Domains group title menu, select 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 the site owner can publish the site to the server. For instructions on publishing a Web site, refer to the section Creating and Publishing a Site.

    Note: If you transferred this domain name from another Web host, you will need to update the host DNS address with the domain name registrar so as to point to your name servers: log in to your registrar's Web site, locate the forms used to manage the domain host pointers, and replace the current DNS host settings with your name servers' hostnames. The information on new name servers will spread across the DNS system within 48 hours.

If you have registered several domain names that you would like to point to a site hosted on this server, you should set up domain aliases. Refer to the Setting Up Additional Domain Names for a Site (Domain Aliases) section for details.

If you need to host on your account several domains, which will point to a site hosted on another server, you should set up domain forwarding. Refer to the section Serving Domain Names for Sites Hosted on Other Servers (Domain Forwarding) for details.

In this section:

Adjusting Resource Usage Limits for a Site

Allowing the Site Owner to Log in to Control Panel Using a Domain Administrator Account