To make your website available to the world under the domainname you registered you need to upload the website to the Primerelay webserver. This is done via FTP, the File Transfer Protocol
To start uploading your website you need two things:
- Your accountdata. This contains the username and password to use.
- An FTP client.
FTP clients are available for all platforms. If your machine does not have one pre-installed you can download one for free at places like Tucows.
cgi-bin
htdocs
lib
log
stats
The htdocs directory is the so called webroot. Files in this directory will be available directly after your domainname. So, an index.html file placed directly inside htdocs will be available as:
http://www.yourdomain.tld/index.html
A directory made inside the htdocs directory will be accessable like this:
http://www.yourdomain.tld/directoryname/
So, it's important to put all your website documents (HTML files, images, PHP files, Flash movies, etc) inside the htdocs directory.
The first page of your website (the page people will see when typing www.domain.tld) must be named index.html (or index.php in case it's a PHP script). If not, the webserver will not recognize the starting page and will instead display a directory listing.
The cgi-bin directory is only for CGI-scripts. More info on CGI-scripts can be found on the CGI scripts & file permissions page.
The lib directory is especially created to store files that you should be able to access from within scripts, but not through the webserver itself. For example, if you use MySQL you should create a seperate file that connects with the database. This seperate file (containing the username and password for database access) should be placed into the lib directory. By placing that file there you are certain that it cannot be accessed through your website.
The log directory contains the logfiles of your website. For more info on these logfiles see the Using the logfiles page.
The stats dir contains the vistor statistics for your website. For more details on these statistics take a look at the Checking your website statistics page.
