Tutorials - Webspace > Using your Webspace

Tutorials and FAQ : General : Using your Webspace

This Tutorial is aimed at those who are making use of their webspace for the first time and need some pointers to help them get started.

When you sign for an internet account with PlusNet you are allowed some Webspace to use for producing your own website or even just storing files on if you so wish.

How much space do you get
With a Pay as You Go account you get 25 megabytes and with the other subscription accounts you get 250 megabytes of space on the home accounts.

Where is this space?
Your space is located on the main PlusNet server and if you type into your internet browser address bar http://www.username.plus.com (where username is your actual account login name) then you will find it brings up a page that gives you a welcome to your webspace.
This page is actually a file called index.htm and later we will replace this file so that when you navigate to this page you can have it display what you want people to see.

The index file
If you want things to open automatically when someone calls up your webspace or web site then a file called index.htm or index.html is used and their browser will look for and open this file without them having to type the name of the file.
Example, on the tutorials website you could enter www.tutorialsteam.plus.com or www.tutorialsteam.plus.com/index.htm both will open the starting file on the site.
A tip here is to always have an index file in the root of your webspace and in sub folders even if it is a blank file. This prevents anyone from reading the other files and directories that you may have on your space.

FTP
In order to make use of this web space you need to "FTP" to it. FTP is the acronym for "File Transfer Protocol" and is the system used to pass data (files) to or from your web space.
There are two ways of "FTP-ing" to your web space.
One is to use a program designed to do the job such as CuteFTP. A search for FTP with one of the search engines will lead to many more, most of which you can download for a trial and some are even free.
Some help on setting your FTP program can be found here

The other method providing that you have a recent version of Internet Explorer is to just type in ftp://ftp.plus.net/ into your browser and this will bring up a box requesting your username and password.
Once you have entered these your browser will open up your web space starting at the root directory of your space.
Here you will see two folders, one called htdocs and one called logs.
The htdocs folder is your working folder where you will place all the other files and folders that make up your website.
The logs folder is where you will find things like webstats stored should you make use of this facility.

Having now accessed your webspace
Once you have your webspace on screen and double clicked on the htdocs folder you will find the index.htm (or .html you can use either) and it is now a simply a matter of dragging and dropping files or folders from another opened folder on your desktop. Like wise you can delete files from the space with a right mouse click and selecting delete from the options box that appears.
You can also create new folders in this space and it is a good idea to keep things organised and have different types of files in their own named folders.
An example of this would be to have a folder called images to store your pictures in.

Creating your web pages.
As mentioned above the first file you should create is one called index.htm and this is the file that browsers will open first on reaching your site. Here you would replace the existing index file with your new one.
There are many ways of producing your site which vary from writing pure code yourself in html (Hypertext Markup Language) to using sofisticated packages that do most things for you. These are things like "Front Page" and "Dream Weaver" but these of course come at a price.
You can use things like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher to produce pages. I would only recommend these if you are making fairly simple pages although they both have the ability to include hyperlinks to other sites / pages and images.
You could also try the PlusNet Website builder which has some limitations but will allow you to get started and try your hand.

Your CGI Space
Once you are familiar with using your space and have constructed a web page you may want to develop it more and make use of your CGI space if your account supports it. View the tutorial on CGI/Shell Server Basics for information on the CGI Facilities.

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Original Article by: johnessex - Edited by: csogilvie