Setting Up a Web Site
To set up a Web site:
- Go to Home > Domains group title menu > Create Domain.
- Select your account and click Next >>.
- Specify the following settings:
- Specify the domain name that was previously registered with a domain name registrar. Leave the www check box selected if you want to allow users to access the site by a common and habitual URL like www.your-domain.com.
- If you have previously created a domain template and predefined all hosting features and resource usage allotments (as described in the chapter Simplifying Setup of Web Sites), select the required template from the Select template menu.
- If you have a number of IP addresses to choose from, select the required address from the Select an IP address menu.
Bear in mind that e-commerce sites need a dedicated IP address (not shared among other sites) to implement Secure Sockets Layer data encryption.
- Select the Mail and DNS check boxes.
- Select the Physical hosting option to host the Web site on this machine.
- Type in the username and password that will be used for uploading Web site content over FTP and Microsoft FrontPage (available only for Windows hosting).
- Select the Configure advanced Web hosting settings check box and click Next >>.
- Specify the following settings:
- SSL support. Select the SSL support check box to enable SSL protection for your site.
- Use a single directory for housing SSL and non-SSL content (available only for Linux hosting). By default, when users publish their sites through their FTP accounts, they need to upload the Web content that should be accessible via secure connections to the httpsdocs directory, and the content that should be accessible via plain HTTP, to the httpdocs directory. For the convenience of publishing all content through a single location –
httpdocs
directory, select the Use a single directory for housing SSL and non-SSL content check box. - Hard disk quota. Specify the amount of disk space in megabytes allocated to the Web space for this site. This is the so-called hard quota that will not allow writing more files to the Web space when the limit is reached. At attempt to write files, users will get the "Out of disk space" error. Hard quotas should be enabled in the server's operating system, so if you see the "Hard disk quota is not supported" notice to the right of the Hard disk quota field, but would like to use the hard quotas, contact your provider or the server administrator and ask to enable the hard quotas.
- Access to the server over SSH or Remote Desktop with FTP user's credentials. This allows you to upload securely Web content to the server through a Secure Socket Shell or Remote Desktop connection.
- Create and publish Web site using Sitebuilder. Select this option if you would like to create and manage your Web site using the Sitebuilder service installed on the server.
- Microsoft FrontPage support. Microsoft FrontPage is a popular Web site authoring tool. If you plan to create and manage your site through Microsoft FrontPage, select the options Microsoft FrontPage support, Microsoft FrontPage over SSL support, and Remote FrontPage authoring allowed.
- Support for programming and scripting languages. Specify which of the following programming and scripting languages should be interpreted, executed or otherwise processed by the Web server: Active Server Pages (ASP), Server Side Includes (SSI), PHP hypertext preprocessor (PHP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Fast Common Gateway Interface (FastCGI), Perl, Python, ColdFusion, and Miva scripting languages. By default, PHP is configured to operate in safe mode with functional restrictions. To learn more about PHP safe mode, refer to http://php.net/features.safe-mode. Some Web applications may not work properly with safe mode enabled: If an application on a site fails due to safe mode, switch the safe mode off (or ask your provider to do this) by clearing the PHP 'safe_mode' on check box in the hosting account properties (Domains > domain name > Web Hosting Settings).
- Web statistics. Select the statistics program you would like to use from the Web statistics menu, and select the accessible via password protected directory /plesk-stat/webstat check box. This will install the statistics program of your choice, which will generate reports and place them into the password protected directory. You will then be able to access Web statistics at the URL: https://your-domain.com/plesk-stat/webstat using your FTP account login and password.
- Custom error documents. When visitors coming to your site request pages that the Web server cannot find, the Web server generates and displays a standard HTML page with an error message. If you wish to create your own error pages and use them on your Web server, select the Custom error documents check box.
- Additional write/modify permissions (available only for Windows hosting). This option is required if Web applications under a domain will be using a file-based database (like Jet) located in the root of
httpdocs
or httpsdocs
folders. Please note that selecting this option might seriously compromise the Web site security. - Use dedicated IIS application pool (available only for Windows hosting). This option enables the use of dedicated IIS application pool for Web applications on a domain. Using dedicated IIS application pool dramatically improves the stability of domain Web applications due to worker process isolation mode. This mode gives each Web site hosted on the server the possibility to allocate a separate process pool for execution of its Web applications. This way, malfunction in one application will not cause stopping of all the others. This is especially useful when you are using shared hosting package.
- Click OK.
Now the server is ready to accommodate the new Web site, and you can do the following:
To learn what else you can do with your Web site through the control panel, see Managing Web Sites.
To learn what else you can do with e-mail accounts through the control panel, see Managing E-mail Services.