General Introduction

Most hosts including myself (1stchoicewebhost.co.uk) offer storage space for web pages with global public access to those pages over the Internet along with a . limited form of program execution known as "cgi-bin."

Depending on the type of server will depend on the operating system the most common being  Apache over Linux. Apache responds to web page requests from remote browsers while Linux is one of several variants of the Unix operating system.

Hosting companies operate by providing  customers their  own password protected userid under Linux. By logging in with his userid, the customer gains access to his web storage space. Every userid "owns" a structure of disk subdirectories in the Linux file system. The "root" of this structure is the "home" directory, found at path "/home/userid." Note that this is somewhat similar to the MS-DOS directory structure, except that there is no drive letter and forward slashes are used instead of backward slashes..

When you FTP to your account using your domain name and userid, you don't need to put in "home/userid." You will automatically be taken there.

Inside the home directory are many files and other directories. The most important one is named "www" or ”public_html” , however, it is important you do not delete any directories in the root.

Every customer has his own separate "www" subdirectory. Files placed in the "www" directory are visible to remote browsers over the Internet, so this is where you want to place all your html documents, graphics, sounds, files, etc. which you want people to be able to access from the world wide web.

For example, when a browser asks for URL http://yourdomain.com/page.html, Apache looks for the file: /home/yourdomain/www/page.html and sends it out

Next