Web Hosting Basics

Control Panel
Access your Control Panel through your www.yourdomain.com/cpanel to change your password, administer your account, view your visitor stats, check your disk space and data transfer usage, and more.

Uploading your web site
If you have Microsoft FrontPage extensions installed, only use FrontPage to upload your site or you might corrupt the extensions and your site. All other customers will use an FTP program such as WS_FTP or CuteFTP for uploading. These programs contain instructions for their use.

Your activation email provides you with the information you need to configure your FTP program: your web hosting domain name, userID, and password. Always upload your web pages and text files using ASCII mode and upload images and most other files using BINARY mode. Our UNIX-based servers are case sensitive so Faq.html, FAQ.html, and faq.html will all be considered different files.

Your home page
In order to make your home page appear when someone visits your domain you will need to give it a proper file name. Our UNIX-based servers look for a home page in the following order: index.html, index.htm, index.shtml, default.html.

Directories
You should ignore all the directories in your hosting account except "cgi-bin" which is where you should upload your personal perl, C, or UNIX shell cgi scripts. This directory has been specially set up to allow scripts to run properly. All the other directories are special system directories. You may create new directories for your own use by either clicking "mkdir" in your FTP program or by uploading a folder from your hard drive. You can password protect any directory you create by using the Password Protection tool in your Control Panel. This tool allows you to define userID/password combinations that visitors must enter when they try view any files within the password protected directory on your site.

Usage Statistics
See who is visiting your web site, when they visit, what sites referred them to yours (if any), and more by checking your usage statistics available through your Control Panel. Cornerstone Media Group has provided the AwStats package for your usage statitistics. Customers may also download their log files and process them through another PC-based statistics package.

Can't access your control panel?
If your password doesn't work, check your activation notice for the correct spelling and make sure "Caps Lock" is not activated on your keyboard. You may contact us if you need to reset your password. If you can't connect to your Web site at all, there may be network problems somewhere between your location and your Internet service provider. Please call their service number to check for any access problems they may have.