This page is a quick guide to managing the html files of your pwp. Click on one of the links below to find out more.
- Index files
- Case sensitivity
- Web forwarding
- Why is my site bigger on your servers than on my hard drive?
- What is the .htaccess file for?
- What is the directory structure all about?
- Backups
Index files
It is far more desirable for you to be able to give out a home page address to your visitors of the format:
http://www.yourwebsitealias.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
than it is to give them one that looks like this:
http://www.yourwebsitealias.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/file-name.html
To do this you should call your "home" page one of the following names:
- index.html
- index.htm
- default.html
- default.htm
Our server looks for these files in the order above. Hence, if you upload a file called index.html AND a file called default.html, the index file will be displayed by default. It's a good idea to make a decision on what file name you will use and implement this throughout your site.
Some versions of Microsoft FrontPage will set your home page to be whatever the web server's primary index file name is, in our case index.html. Hence, if you are a FrontPage user it would be a good idea to make this your default file name for reasons of consistency.
Our current PWP platform is case sensitive. This means that you can have a file called index.html and a file called Index.html [i.e. with a capital letter in it] on the same platform, and they are separate files.
On the previous platform, you were unable to do this.
From the world wide web standards on URLs (http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/htmlweb.html):
"URLs in general are case-sensitive (with the exception of machine names). There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn't matter, but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive."
To get around any issues that might arise [for example, if you have purchased any web forwarding services from a third party company] with this, you should ensure that all files uploaded to our servers have lower case characters throughout, and that you include no spaces in your filenames.
For example, a web page called
My Page.html
Should be called
my-page.html
If you adhere to this standard, your site will work on all standard Internet file systems.
One of our users [Martyn P] has pointed out to us a FrontPage add-in tool that can automatically convert filenames from upper case to lower case. Click on the link below and scroll down the page to download it.
http://www.jimcoaddins.com/addins.aspxWeb forwarding
See the point above on case sensitivity, this may be the issue if your web forwarding has ceased working. If you include a home page for your site called index.html you do not need to add anything to the end of your site when setting up your web forwarding.
Hence, if your home page is called this you should just get your web forwarding to redirect to:
http://www.yourwebsitealias.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Rather than something like this:
http://www.yourwebsitealias.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Home.htm
As some versions of FrontPage can change your filename when you upload (see above), this is good practice. As long as your home page is called index.html, index.htm, default.html or default.htm (see above) you should be fine.
Why is my site bigger on your servers than on my hard drive?
All operating systems [e.g. Windows, UNIX] make use of "blocks" of disk space to store your files in. The size of these blocks varies, as does the unused space on the file system, which is in reality wasted as it cannot be re-used by any other user on the file system.
If you have a 1K file on a file system with blocks of the size of 4K [as they are on the PWP platform], 3K will be "wasted" space. On our platform, which runs the UNIX operating system, the wasted space is attributed to the user.
If you are a Windows user, your operating system will only report back on the size of your files, not on the size that they will take up on a server when uploaded to it.
If you have a lot of small files on your website [which are hence contributing much "wasted" space when uploaded to the PWP platform], there will be a discrepancy between the size of the files themselves and how much they use up when on the servers [which you can see via the quota reports in Self Care].
The only official figure as to your quota usage is the figure that the pie chart available from Self Care displays.
What is the .htaccess file for?
The .htaccess file controls the way our servers deliver your site to the Internet. We have some configuration for this across all our sites, but this file gives you the flexibility to "tweak" it for your site only, to password protect a section or create your own error pages, for example.
The purpose of this file is to add some of the flexibility of being able to amend the web server configuration for your site only without having to access and change the core server configuration.
Click here for more information.
What is the directory structure all about?
When you login via FTP, you are placed in a directory called "htdocs". Most users will never need to know anything more. This is where you should upload your web pages, and from where they are served. This is also where Microsoft FrontPage uploads your site to, if you use this program.
You can change up a directory in your FTP program, and see 2 directories -- /stats and /logs - as well as the /htdocs directory. /logs enabled you to have access to download your log files via FTP [if you don't wish to get them from Self Care], and /stats is used by Self Care to deliver the graphs back to the browser when you login to Self Care.
Backups
You are responsible for backing your own site up. If you lose your site contents, you will not be able to ask us to recover them for you. We do not keep backups of your website, just of our server configuration.
