This article will help you understand your personal webhosting package, and how you can use it.

Your webhosting package uses the same quota as your email account. You can choose to assign as much quota as you like to store your web files and this is then deducted from your email quota.

If you want to check or change your quota, log in to webmail and go to MY ACCOUNT > QUOTA USAGE, or MY ACCOUNT > WEBHOSTING for your FTP (webhosting) quota.

Your webhosting package supports plain HTML pages with standard image formats. You will also be given FTP access so that you can upload and publish pages such as an online CV, personal webpage, or photo galleries. There is no server side scripting (for example, PHP) or database support.

Information such as your page address, access details and basic instructions will be in an email sent to you once you have paid for and activated your webhosting account.
If your email address is username@domain.com, webpage address/URL will be: http://www.'domain.com'/users/'username'.

Webpages are usually built with HTML and CSS. If you wish to write the HTML for your page yourself, there is a good HTML tutorial site here. This site also has a good introduction to HTML, including a brief explanation of what it is:

"HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. A markup language combines text and extra information about the text. The extra information, related to the text's structure and presentation - things like whether the text is bold, where it is positioned on the page, etc, that information is expressed using 'markup', which is intermingled with ordinary text. In the case of HTML, the markup information is contained in 'tags', which are easily recognisable by the <> symbols."

You also have some choices as to how you write your code. You can use a plain text editor (such as notepad, wordpad etc) or an html text editor.

There are lots of free and open source editors out there that you can use. Here are some we have found for PC: CoffeeCup (Recommended), Aptana Studio and 1st Page 2000.

These ones can be used on a Mac: Aptana Studio, Komodo Edit and Smultron.

There are lots more out there; you can always search google for the one that suits you best!

If you would rather not have to write the HTML yourself, you can use a WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") web editor. Possibly one of the most well known examples of these is Adobe Dreamweaver. With this type of editor, you design your site visually, and the program writes the code for you accordingly.

Once you are happy with your page, save the file as index.html (all lowercase). You can either use your own FTP uploader program or you can use our online ftp uploader, found here: https://secure.aluminati.net/aluminati.net/net2ftp/. If you are not sure how to use the FTP uploader to upload your files, please read this tutorial.

Once you have logged in, you should see a folder called /www. The folder called 'www' is important, as it is the public folder - the folder that your web address points to. All files that you upload (such as images) must go in there including the index.html file in order for it to be visible online.

When you upload your file you may not see the difference straight away. This is because we host your website on multiple redundant servers, and the change has not yet been replicated. This means that your change has been uploaded to one server, and it will take around 2-5 minutes for it to be passed to all the others.

If you do not wish to wait, you can force your browser to use the master webserver by editing your "hosts" file to point from your domain to address 64.22.85.162. The location of this file varies so look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file to find out where yours is. Your entries should look like:

yourdomain.com 64.22.85.162
www.yourdomain.com 64.22.85.162

Where yourdomain.com is the domain part of your web site address.

Please contact support if you have any trouble getting your website to work. We are unable to provide assistance for coding / html development issues but we are happy to help with anything else!

Enjoy your personal webspace!