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Getting Started: Going Live

Monday, July 8th, 2013 4 Comments

In this article, we will talk about how to get your website live on the internet.

Note: If you ordered your domain and hosting from us, then you have nothing to worry about. Your website should become live very shortly after you complete your order. Please keep in mind that if you don’t have any content on your site, you will see the default web page until you upload/create content.

Domain

The key to going live is all about the domain and where it is pointing. If you had hosting with another hosting service provider and you are moving your site to our services, it is very likely that your domain is still pointing at the old provider.

If you are using our free migration service, our support staff will let you know when it is time to change where the domain points.

If you are not using our free migration service, but your domain is pointing somewhere else, it is recommended that if you have a high traffic website, you wait until your content has been uploaded before you point the domain to our services.

When you are ready to point your domain to our services, you have two primary options.

Domain Name Servers

You can point the Domain Name Servers (or DNS for short) to our DNS servers. This will allow Site5’s servers to manage all of your DNS records and it will automatically link up to your domain with your hosting account.

Site5’s DNS Servers

  • dns.site5.com
  • dns2.site5.com

For information on how to update the DNS settings at your current registrar, please contact your registrars support team.

A-Records

You also have the option of keeping your domain’s DNS records at its current DNS provider. This function is normally used by people who have multiple servers/services and have subdomains pointing to each of these services. If you are only hosting your site(s) from a single service, it is recommended that you use the DNS method above.

The principle behind this method is that you would point an A-Record to the IP address of the shared server. For information on how to do this, please contact your DNS provider.

For information on how to find the IP address of your site or server, please see the following link…

Posted in: Getting Started

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4 Comments

  • Russel Beron November 25, 2013 at 11:37 pm

    Hi, I am trying to load a placeholder page onto the domain. I have created the file and used filezilla to upload. I see it in File Manager (do I need to use Filezilla, can I not just use File Manager?) but nothing seems to happen.

    Please help, I am very non-technical.

    Russel

  • James Davey November 26, 2013 at 8:30 am

    Hello Russel,

    I hope your morning is treating you well. Regarding your question, you have two options:

    1 – Make sure your placeholder page is named index.html (or index.php, index.shtml, index.htm, etc…). By default, the server looks for ‘index’ and loads that file. If none is found, the server loads the splash page. Please note that filenames are case-sensitive, so if you have it named Index.html (with a capital i), the server will not use it by default.

    2 – If you don’t want to change the filename, the second option is a little more complicated, but has the same result. In your File Manager, in the public_html folder, you should have a file named .htaccess (note the preceding period, that is part of the filename). You may need to specify that File Manager show hidden files to see this. If you edit that, you can add the following line:

    DirectoryIndex something.something

    Just replace ‘something.something’ with the name of the file you want to load first. So, if your splash page is named Splash.html, the line in your .htaccess would be

    DirectoryIndex Splash.html

    Note, again, that this is case-sensitive.

  • Raymond December 14, 2013 at 10:24 pm

    I’ve uploaded my file and done as above. I still get the site5 splash page instead of my own. Do I need to enable it or something? Step by step instructions would be very helpful. Thanks

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