Domain Help

Designing your website

Before you can upload your website, you will need to design it. There are many programs available for designing your website.

If you are looking for an FTP client to upload files to your web directory we suggest using FileZilla.

If you are looking for a program you can use to design your website, a free program we suggest is NVU from http://www.nvu.com/.

Uploading your website

Logging in:

For the "Server" or "Host," enter the name of your domain.
    Example: somedomain.net

If there is a place to enter a subdirectory, you should enter "www" (without the quotation marks.) If there is not another field for that, then enter it in the "Server" or "Host" field.
    Example: somedomain.net/www

In the username box, enter the username that you gave us @ the domain. You need the domain part in there or it will not work.
    Example: joeuser@somedomain.net

The password is case sensitive.  That means that if it's lower case on our end, it needs to be lower case when you type it in.

What are these folders?

When you log into the site via FTP, you will see at a minimum of 3 directories: www; private; log.

/www:
The www directory is where the content for www.<yourdomain.dom> is kept. If you have subdomains, they will have a directory that is the name of the subdomain e.g. content for forum.<yourdomain.dom> would be in a forum directory. In any of these web content directories, if you want a page to be displayed automatically when someone goes to that domain,  the index document names that the server checks for are: index.html; index.htm; index.php; index.cgi; index.pl.

NOTE: Content on this server is case sensitive. If you include an image on your web page, make sure you point to the correct file.  e.g. if you have a file 'images/Logo.jpg' your image tag should be
      <img src="images/Logo.jpg">
NOT
      <img src="images/logo.jpg">

robots.txt
In your /www folder is a file called robots.txt. The purpose of this file is to prevent search engines from finding specific parts of your website. You can get more information from the Internet about robots.txt if you'd like to learn more about it.

You can use this file to prevent Red River from listing your folder on our list of hosted user's pages. To do that, add the following lines to your robots.txt:

User-agent: RedRiver
Disallow: /

/private:
The private directory is a place to put files that may be accessed by a perl or php script, but not directly from the web. An example of this would be if you were running a guest book, the contents of the guest book could be written there and then read through a script. This is not a secure location on this server, if someone else who hosts something on this server wants to see what is in there, they could write a script that would access the data. If you need that sort of security, you should have a secure certificate and choose a different hosting package, or possibly use our colocation facilities. We do not currently have a server that is set up to support that type of security, but it is on the list. If you need these features, let us know and the priority will be increased.

/log:
The log directory contains the last 90 days of logs. Older logs will be compressed in gzip format. You should be able to open them with any standard unzipping program. We only keep the last 90 days of logs, if you need more than that, you should download them yourself on a regular basis and archive them. Inside the log directory there is an awstats directory, this is where awstats keeps the data it extracts from the logs. Those are automatically created and should not be deleted unless you want to get rid of the statistics.

Statistics (/log/awstats):
If you'd like to view statistics about the visitors to your website, you can view them by adding /awstats/awstats.pl to the end of your domain name.
If you'd like to have access to additional statistics about the visitors to your website, add the following code to the HTML source of the first page of your website:

<!----(Copy below this line.  Do not copy this line.)---->
<script language=javascript src="/awstatjs/awstats_misc_tracker.js"></script>
<noscript>
    <img src="/awstatjs/awstats_misc_tracker.js?nojs=y" height=0 width=0 border=0 style="display: none">
</noscript>
<!----(Copy above this line. Do not copy this line)---->

MySQL Database Administration (/db_dumps):
For websites with a MySQL database, we have a page set up where you can log in to browse, backup, and restore your database contents. You can use phpMyAdmin to modify your database, but Red River does not provide support for this service. Please use the link for "phpMyAdmin Documentation" for assistance once you are logged in.

The username and password required to log in to phpMyAdmin are not the same as the username and password you use to access your site via FTP. Instead, use your MySQL database username and password to access the phpMyAdmin pages. This information can usually be found in the configuration files of the script that is accessing your database.

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Red River Communications