Getting Started With Windows Shared Hosting
Getting Started With Windows Shared Hosting
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Table of Contents
1 Table of Contents i
2 Introduction iv
Security Information iv
Creating a Strong Password v
Getting Help v
Other Resources vi
Now that you’ve purchased your Windows shared hosting account, you’re probably dying
to take it out for a spin. But before you do, it’s a good idea to find out what’s going on
under the hood. This guide assists you in getting your Web site up and running quickly.
Along the way, we’ll even pass on some general hosting information that you can use to
impress your friends.
Your shared hosting account resides on a server along with other accounts. The server’s
resources are shared across these accounts, hence the term shared hosting. This is in
contrast to dedicated hosting, which allows a single account to exclusively use one server.
A major benefit to having a shared hosting account is that we take care of your server
security, backup, and maintenance.
SECURITY INFORMATION
The most important security measure you can take is keeping your hosting account pass
word secure. Anyone with access to your password can potentially manipulate the content
on your site and compromise your account. If your password has been compromised, you
can change it through the Hosting Control Center.
It may take up to thirty minutes for the change to take effect.
¢ Must contain between 714 characters.
¢ Must be made up of lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and numbers.
¢ Cannot begin with a number or symbol.
¢ Cannot contain backslashes, colons, single quotes, double quotes, spaces, or the
caret symbol ( ^ ).
¢ Cannot contain your user name.
GETTING HELP
After your account is set up, you can always find shared hosting help on the Web with our
Hosting Resource Center, located within our Help Center.
3. Click the Help Center link on the right side of the screen.
The Help Center, which is a knowledge base with the most cur
rent shared hosting technical information, opens in a new win
dow.
4. In the Select a Category panel, click Windows Hosting.
The Hosting Control Center also provides contextsensitive help through question mark
icons that appear beside select form fields. When clicked, these icons provide additional
information and/or explanation.
You can also contact Customer Support directly for answers to your questions.
Introduction vi
OTHER RESOURCES
You can use these resources to learn more about programming your shared hosting
account:
Resource URL
W3Schools http://www.w3schools.com/
A free repository of Web programming tutorials on topics
from XHTML to ASP.
DevGuru http://www.devguru.com/
DevGuru is an exhaustive Web programming reference
Web site.
Setting Up Your New
1. Hosting Account
Some prep work is required to ready your account for the uploading of site content. First,
you must set up your shared hosting account and specify its domain name servers (DNS).
Setting up your account installs the default hosting files and directory structure needed to
upload content. Accurate domain name server information must be assigned to your
account so visitors are directed to your site content.
To jumpstart this whole process, you need to set up your hosting account.
The Account Manager is where you manage account administrative
functions and hostingrelated products such as email.
The Hosting Control Center is where you configure hosting account
functionality.
2. Under the My Products section, select Hosting Account List.
3. Next to the hosting account you want to set up, click Setup Account.
Fig. 1.1 Set up Account link in your Account Manager.
Setting Up Your New Hosting Account 2
4. The End User License Agreement displays. Read the agreement, select the
checkbox acknowledging that you have read and agree to it, and click Next.
5. Enter a new user name and password for your hosting account, and confirm your
password.
This is the User ID and password that you use to connect to
your hosting account with an FTP client. This is also the data
you need to access your free Web Statistics.
Fig. 1.2 Select a user name and password.
6. Click Next.
If your domain name is not registered with us, it is not displayed on
the drop down list. In this case, select "Enter a domain not registered
here." and enter the domain name in the provided field.
Fig. 1.3 Select the domain you want to use with your hosting account.
Setting Up Your New Hosting Account 3
8. Update the default account options if necessary, and then click Next.
9. If you have an available Standard Single Domain SSL certificate that you would like to
apply to this account, select the certificate, and then read and agree to the Subscriber
Agreement.
Fig. 1.4 Apply an available Standard Single Domain SSL certificate.
If you do not have an available Standard Single Domain SSL
certificate or other addon, this screen is not displayed.
10. Click Next
11. Ensure all settings are correct. If you need to update any information, use the
Previous button(s), and then return to this screen.
12. Click Submit.
A Congratulations message displays letting you know that your hosting account should be
ready to use shortly. While this process generally completes within 30 minutes, it can take
up to 24 hours. Once your hosting account is ready to use, we send you an email mes
sage containing all of your basic accountmanagement information.
The Hosting Account Details window appears on the right. This section displays the cur
rent status of your hosting account. In general, these are the different types of account
status that you'll see:
Status Explanation
Initialize Account You need to set up your hosting account in order to use it. To
set up your hosting account, click the name of the account you
want to set up.
Pending DNS Your hosting account needs to match up with your domain
name before you can upload files and manage your Web site.
Depending on when you set up the name servers for your
domain, it can take up to 8 hours for your hosting account to
match up with .com and .net domains and up to 48 hours for
other domain extensions.
Pending Account This account status displays whenever you have upgraded or
Change downgraded your hosting account.
Pending Setup This account status displays after you have set up your
account. It may take a few minutes for us to configure your
hosting account before you can use it.
Setup Your account is set up. You may still have to wait up to 48
hours before you can upload files to your account (FTP), set
up databases, or configure your Web site.
Once your hosting account is set up, you can log in to the Hosting Control Center to man
age your account, set up databases, and install various Web site features.
This condition makes it possible for people across the Internet to access your Web site
using a familiar domain name, instead of having to remember a series of numbers.
It usually takes about 48 hours for .com and .net domains, and about 2448 hours for all
other domain extensions, before name servers on other networks are able to access the
information after the central registry receives it. This period is referred to as the propaga
tion period.
You can check if your name servers change has propagated by navigating to
http://www.internic.net/whois.html and performing a Whois search on your domain.
Setting Up Your New Hosting Account 5
The process for setting up your name servers depends on the company from which you
bought your domain. If your hosting account domain name was registered with us and
resides in the same shopper account, its name servers will be changed automatically at
the time hosting is set up. Otherwise, new name servers are required.
The default nameservers for your hosting account depend on the date you set up your
hosting. Use this list to determine your default nameservers:
OR
wsc1.jomax.net
wsc2.jomax.net
Check with your domain name registrar for specific instructions on how to change your
name servers.
These name servers will point your domain name to your hosting account.
Remember that it usually takes about 48 hours for .com and
.net domains and about 2448 hours for all other domain exten
sions before you can upload your Web site.
This period is referred to as the propagation period.
Setting Up Your New Hosting Account 6
This is an example of what your Hosting Control Center looks like when you first log in:
Fig. 1.5 Your Hosting Control Center home page.
The Hosting Control Center is a graphical interface whose purpose is to facilitate the man
agement of your hosting account. All of the procedures outlined in this guide, with the
exception of uploading from a thirdparty FTP client, take place within the Hosting Control
Center. The Hosting Control Center is also a source of current account status information.
Error log, Web statistics, and language management interfaces are accessed from the
Hosting Control Center.
Creating and
2. Uploading a Web Page
The reason you purchased a shared hosting account to begin with is to see your original
content out on the Web. The easiest way to accomplish this is by creating and uploading
HTML/XHTML pages. In the sections that follow, we’ll walk you through both processes.
<html>
<head>
<title>My New Web Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is My New Web Site</h1>
<p>Hey! Welcome to my Web site. I wrote this code all by
myself. Stay tuned.</p>
</body>
</html>
3. Save your file as index.html (all lowercase). Some editors try to save your file as
“index.txt,” but you should be able to override this by typing the file name when you
save your HTML page. If not, you can manually rename your file after you save it.
Creating and Uploading a Web Page 8
Here are a few places on the Web where you can learn more about HTML:
¢ W3 School's XHTML Tutorial
¢ Webmonkey's HTML Basics
There are also a number of commercial tools available that help you create a Web site
even if you don't know HTML. These are called WYSIWYG (pronounced whizeewig) or
WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet editors. Macromedia Dreamweaver® and Microsoft
FrontPage® are two examples of WYSIWYG editors.
There are many free FTP clients available on the Internet that you can use to transfer
your files. If you only need to upload a few simple files, you can also use the Webbased
FTP client available in the Hosting Control Center.
Fig. 2.1 Open link in your Account Manager.
Creating and Uploading a Web Page 9
4. Under the Content section of the Hosting Control Center, click the FTP Client icon.
Fig. 2.2 FTP Client icon in your Account Manager.
5. If a security certificate window displays, click Yes or Trust to accept the certificate
and open the FTP program. In general, this is what the FTP program looks like when
you open it for the first time:
Fig. 2.3 FTP client interface.
Creating and Uploading a Web Page 10
6. In the Local System section, go to the location on your computer where you saved
your index.htm file and select your file.
Fig. 2.4 Select your file to upload.
7. Click the >> arrows to upload the index.htm file to your hosting account.
Fig. 2.5 Upload selected file to hosting server.
Creating and Uploading a Web Page 11
After you upload your file, open a new Web browser window and type the URL to your
new file in your browser's address bar. Your URL should look like this:
http://www.coolexample.com/
Replace “coolexample.com” with your domain name.
You should now see a simple Web page with the phrases, “This is My New Web Site” and
“Hey! Welcome to my Web site. I wrote this code all by myself. Stay tuned.” If not, you
may still need to wait for your hosting account to complete setup.
Fig. 2.6 Index.html sample page display.
If you continue to have problems uploading your file, or you cannot see your index.html
page, please contact customer support.
Here are some popular and inexpensive (some of them are free) FTP clients that you can
download and use:
¢ FileZilla (Windows)
¢ Smart FTP (Windows)
¢ Fetch (Mac®)
¢ gFTP (Linux)
Setting Explanation
FTP User Name This is the user name for your hosting account.
FTP Password This is your password for your hosting account.
Web Site URL http://www.coolexample.com
Where “coolexample.com” is your domain name.
FTP Site URL ftp://www.coolexample.com
Where “coolexample.com” is your domain name.
Start Directory Some FTP clients will ask for a “Home” or “Start” directory.
Our hosting service does not require this. Simply leave the
box blank or enter a single forward slash (i.e., /).
TROUBLESHOOTING
Sometimes you do all the preparations to get your Web site up and running, and some
thing just doesn’t work. We have identified some of the most common pitfalls, or prob
lems, that you may experience. This section presents important information and
recommended solutions for fixing these problems.
To Change Your Hosting Account Password
1. Log in to your Account Manager.
2. Under the My Products section, select Hosting Account List.
3. Next to the hosting account you want to modify, click Open.
4. Under the Settings section of the Hosting Control Center, click the Account Login
icon.
5. To change your hosting account password, type a new password in the field and click
Update.
When you publish or edit with FrontPage, the program automatically places
your folders in the correct directory location.
default.shtm home.html
Creating and Uploading a Web Page 14
1. Doublecheck that the path to your image and the name of the image are the same,
including the use of uppercase and lowercase letters. If these names are not identical,
the server cannot find your image.
2. When the server cannot find an image, a red X displays. Rightclick on the red X and
select properties to see the link to the image.
We recommend that you use relative URLs when linking to Web pages. Relative URLs
identify a Web page in relation to, or in the context of, the current page. Because they do
not reference the domain name, relative URLs do not require modifications when chang
ing environments.
ns3.secureserver.net
ns4.secureserver.net
http://www.coolexample.com/stats
Replace “coolexample.com” with the name of your domain.
The user ID and password for your statistics page is the same as the user ID and pass
word for your hosting account, unless you have changed it in the Hosting Control Center.
Setting Up Email For
3. Your Hosting Account
All our hosting plans include a number of free email accounts you can set up to incorpo
rate your domain name. For example, if Jane Smith started an online business named
“coolexample.com,” she can create an email account with the address “jane@coolexam
ple.com.” This address is personal, memorable, and slick.
Now that Jane Smith has her email address, let’s create yours.
Fig. 3.1 Add Email Address link in the Email Control Center.
5. In the Add Email area, select whether you are using a domain registered or hosted
with us or a domain registered or hosted elsewhere, then in the Email Address field,
Setting Up Email For Your Hosting Account 17
enter the first part of the email address that you want to create and specify the
domain.
Fig. 3.2 Add Email area in the Email Control Center.
6. In the Password and Confirm Password fields, enter your password.
Fig. 3.3 Enter your password.
7. To send a carbon copy of all email messages sent to this account to another account,
in the Send Carbon Copies To field, type the email address(es) to which you would
like to send copies
Fig. 3.4 Enter carbon copy address.
8. Specify the space you would like to allow for this account. Note the total space
available and that you've used so far. You can increase or decrease this amount at any
time.
Setting Up Email For Your Hosting Account 18
9. Specify if you want this account to be a CatchAll Account. A CatchAll Account is
an email account that you can use to gather any emails sent to your domain name
that don’t have legitimate email addresses.
Fig. 3.5 Incoming mail settings.
10. Select the number of relays you want to send per day from the Relays per Day list.
If you will be using an email client, such as Outlook®, Thunderbird™, or Entourage®,
to send outgoing email through this account, you need to relay those messages
through our servers. All email accounts come with the capability of sending up to 250
email messages per day through SMTP Relay.
Fig. 3.6 SMTP Relaying settings.
11. If you would like a message to be automatically sent to people when they send you
email, select the AutoResponder checkbox and enter the response in the Auto
Responder message field. If you would like to use a custom name or message
subject, enter them in the Custom Responder Properties fields. If you would like
to set specific start and end dates for your message, enter them in the Start Time and
End Time area.
Fig. 3.7 AutoResponder Properties.
12. Click OK.
Setting Up Email For Your Hosting Account 19
User Name The name of the email account you created, for exam
ple jane@coolexample.com.
Password The password you specified when you set up your
email account.
POP3 Setting mail.coolexample.com
Where coolexample.com is your domain name.
SMTP Setting smtpout.secureserver.net
The outgoing (SMTP) server requires authentication
and uses the same user name and password as the
incoming (POP3) server.
smtpout.secureserver.net uses port 25 by default. It
may also use ports 80 or 3535.
For more information about setting up mail accounts, please visit the support section of
our Web site.
smtpout.secureserver.net.
To access your email account using a Web browser, go to the following Web address:
http://email.coolexample.com
Where coolexample.com is the name of your domain.
Sign in to your account using the email address and password you set up in your account
manager.
For example, to access Webmail for the domain that we set up in this guide, you would go
to http://email.coolexample.com/. To sign in, you would use the email address for the
account you want to access, jane@coolexample.com.
Accessing Your Web
4. Site Statistics
The only thing more exciting than putting up a Web site is seeing that people actually visit
it. Knowing your audience can help you better tailor your site to their behavior. It just so
happens that all shared hosting accounts come with builtin Web statistics.
In a Windows shared hosting account, your Web statistics are enabled by default, so can
immediately start collecting information about the visitors to your Web site.
http://www.coolexample.com/stats
Replace “coolexample.com” with the name of your domain.
The user ID and password for your statistics page is the same as the user ID and pass
word for your hosting account, unless you have changed it in the Hosting Control Center.
Managing Domains
5. and Sub Domains on
Your Hosting Account
With Windows shared hosting accounts, you can leverage your hard work and existing
hosted Web site content through the use of alias and sub domains.
Aliasing allows you to assign multiple domain names to one of your hosting accounts.
When users navigate to the alias domain, they see the hosting account's content. Subdo
mains provide an easy way for users to navigate directly to a content sub directory on
your hosting account.
Note: Depending on your hosting plan (Economy, Deluxe, or Premium), you are not lim
ited to pointing an alias domain at the root of your hosting account. Deluxe and Premium
plans can point an alias domain to any hosting content directory. Economy hosting plans
allow you to only point an alias domain at the root of your hosting account.
Fig. 5.1 Open link in your Account Manager.
Managing Domains and Sub Domains on Your Hosting Account 24
4. Under the Settings section of the Hosting Control Center, click the Domain
Management icon.
Fig. 5.2 Domain Management icon in your Hosting Control Center.
5. From the Domain dropdown list, select a domain in your shopper account or type a
domain name that does not exist in your account.
Fig. 5.3 Specify the domain to alias.
6. From the Domain Hosting Path dropdown list, select an existing content directory
or type a new content directory that does not appear in the list.
You can only create a Domain Hosting Path on our Deluxe and
Premium hosting plans.
Using a Domain Hosting Path, you can host multiple domains
with one hosting plan. In the previous example, the content for
the domain “coolexample.net,” will be hosted in the
“new_directory” folder on your primary hosting account.
7. Click Add Domain.
It can take 4–8 hours for .com and .net domains and 24–48 hours for all other domain
extensions to become aliased.
There is no limit to the number of subdirectories you can use, but the path can be no
more than 70 characters.
Fig. 5.4 Open link in your Account Manager.
4. Under the Settings section of the Hosting Control Center, click the Domain
Management icon.
Fig. 5.5 Domain Management icon in your Hosting Control Center.
5. Expand the appropriate domain name panel, and then click Add Sub Domain.
Fig. 5.6 Add Sub Domain link.
Managing Domains and Sub Domains on Your Hosting Account 26
6. In the Sub Domain text box, enter the sub domain that you want to use. In this
example, we’ll create a sub domain called “newdirectory.”
Fig. 5.7 Specify the sub domain site directory.
7. In the Path dropdown list, leave <same as sub domain>. This will create a new
directory in your hosting account with the same name as your sub domain. In this
example, the hosting manager will create a directory called “newdirectory.”
8. Click Save.
It may take a few minutes for the Hosting Control Center to set up your sub domain. Once
this occurs, you can upload a test HTML file to your new sub directory and navigate to
either location below to verify content:
http://www.coolexample.com/newdirectory
http:// newdirectory.coolexample.com
Where “coolexample.com” is your domain name and “newdirectory” is the name of the
sub domain you created.
Creating and
6. Connecting to a
Database
If your hosted Web site contains dynamic content or has datadriven, thirdparty applica
tions installed, it needs a database to store information. Our Windows hosting accounts
offer you a plethora of database choices: MySQL, Access, and SQL Server. Database set
up and management is accomplished through the Hosting Control Center and SQL Server
Web Admin.
Fig. 6.1 Open link in your Account Manager.
4. Under the Databases section of the Hosting Control Center, click the MySQL icon.
Fig. 6.2 MySQL icon in your Hosting Control Center.
Creating and Connecting to a Database 28
5. Click Create New Database.
Fig. 6.3 Create New Database.
6. Select which version of MySQL you want to use and enter a User Name and
Password for your database. You will use this user name and password to connect to
your database. The user name that you create here is also the name of your
database.
Fig. 6.4 Enter your database user name and password.
7. Click Continue.
8. Verify your MySQL database settings. If everything looks okay, click Create
Database.
Fig. 6.5 Click Create Database.
It may take a few minutes to create your database. You can click the Refresh button in
your browser to check and see if your database is ready.
Creating and Connecting to a Database 29
Once you have set up a database for your account, you can click the Pencil icon next to
the name of your database to find your host name information.
To access more advanced management functions (PHPMyAdmin), click Open Manager
next to the database you want to configure.
Fig. 6.6 Open link in your Account Manager.
4. Under the Databases section of the Hosting Control Center, click the MySQL icon.
Fig. 6.7 MySQL icon in your Hosting Control Center.
5. From your list of databases, click the Pencil icon next to the appropriate database.
Fig. 6.8 Pencil icon in your Hosting Control Center.
Creating and Connecting to a Database 30
6. The Database Information page displays. The host name for your database
displays in this area.
Fig. 6.9 Database host name.
CONNECTING TO A DATABASE
Once you know the host name, database name, user name, and password for you data
base, you can connect to it using code or the configuration file for your Web application.
You need this general information to connect to your database:
Setting Explanation
Hostname You can find the host name for your database on the data
base information page in your Hosting Control Center.
Do not use localhost.
User Name The user name you chose when you created your databse.
Database Name This is the same as your user name.
Password The password you chose when you created your database.
Creating and Connecting to a Database 31
This code example uses ADO and VB Script to connect to a SQL Server database. This
script connects to a database, queries a specified table, and prints the contents. NOTE:
Windows shared hosting accounts do not support PHP scripts.
<%
Dim oConn, oRs
Dim qry, connectstr
Dim db_name, db_username, db_userpassword
Dim db_server, fieldname, tablename
db_server = "sql.secureserver.net"
db_name = "your_dbusername"
db_username = "your_dbusername"
db_userpassword = "your_dbpassword"
fieldname = "your_field"
tablename = "your_table"
Do Until oRS.EOF
response.write ucase(fieldname) & ": " & oRs.Fields(field-
name) & "<br/>"
oRS.movenext
Loop
oRS.close
For more information about SQL Server and connecting to a SQL Server database, visit
Microsoft SQL Server Home at: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/default.mspx/.