Introduction

These instructions are intended mainly for customers using our virtual web hosting service.

Any standard FTP application can be used to manage your virtual web site. This tutorial uses CuteFTP for Windows, as it is a popular choice and works well, but any standard FTP program can be used.

This tutorial uses a fictional web site address of www.dogflex.com.au. You should substitute your real web site address in place of this.

If you're using software other than CuteFTP, the screen-shots will obviously be somewhat different, but most of the general principles are the same.

Software Download

CuteFTP is a very good shareware FTP application for Windows. The software can be downloaded from www.cuteftp.com/Cuteftp. A 30-day free trial version is available.

Setup Instructions

When you first run CuteFTP after installing it, a window titled FTP Site Manager will appear.

Click on Personal FTP Sites on the left-hand side of this screen, then click the Add site button.

There are only a few things that need setting up here. First of all, give this connection a "Site Label" or friendly name so you will know what it is later. In this example we've called this Dogflex virtual web site.

Now type in your web site address in the "Host Address" box. For our example we've used www.dogflex.com.au here.

Next type in your "User ID" in the box. This will be up to eight lower case letters and will have been provided to you when your GoWeb virtual web service was activated.

You can optionally now type in your password in the box headed "Password". For added security, you can leave the password box blank here and you will be prompted for the password each time you connect.

Finally, change the "Login type" radio box from "Anonymous" to "Normal". The other settings can be left at their default values.

Your screen should now look something like this:

Click on OK to save these settings.

When you first connect, your screen will look something like this:

The left-hand side of the screen shows your "local" computer, i.e. files and directories stored on your computer.

The right-hand side shows the "remote" computer, i.e. your virtual web server at GoWeb.

The interface is quite straight-forward and works in the same way as other Windows programs. So you can select files by clicking, drop and drag files from your PC to the web server and vice versa.

Case sensitivity

One thing to note here is that Windows is not case-sensitive for filenames, in general. However the Unix web servers used at GoWeb are case-sensitive.

In order to minimise potential problems, we strongly suggest you use all lower-case filenames for all your files. This also means your web links in your HTML documents should refer to lower-case names.

Your starting files

Your virtual web site normally starts off with three items. There will be a directory (shown with a folder icon) called _log which contains the raw logfiles of all hits to your site (don't worry about this one too much for now; this will become clearer down the track).

There will also be a directory called bin. Again, you can safely ignore this directory. (It normally contains just one item, called ls, which is a Unix program that enables you to list the file names on your virtual service.)

Your opening page: index.html

The last of the files, and most interesting, is called index.html (note: all lower-case letters). The file index.html is particularly significant, as this is the default file that is sent when someone types in your web site address without specifying a file name.

For example, if someone typed in www.dogflex.com.au in their web browser, they would be shown the file called index.html.

It is thus important that you call your opening page index.html. If you do not have a file called index.html your site visitors will see a message saying Forbidden - even if you have many other pages present. (We do this deliberately for security reasons; there are many cases where you may not want visitors to be able to see a list of all filenames in your directory.)

Again, beware the case-sensitive issue: if you call your first page Index.html with a capital I, for example, visitors will get the Forbidden message!

Uploading considerations

There are three final points to remember when managing your site via FTP.

• All transfers into your site are counted towards your site's traffic allocation, so although frequent uploads of most files is no problem, be careful if you have a number of very large files. You may want to check and make sure you are only uploading files that have been modified since the last upload, rather than uploading the whole lot.
• Changes you make are visible instantly once you upload your files (except where the pages are stored on the Internet in a cache somewhere, in which case the older copy may persist for a short time). Make sure they say what you really want to say!
• Make sure you have a backup of your full web site. GoWeb can accept no responsibility for loss or damage to the files on your web server so to save yourself much potential hair-pulling, make sure you keep a copy of all your pages. Then make another copy to be sure, and send it to your distant aunt for safe keeping.

Last updated 08 Apr 2005

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