Frank's Cyber Cafe

What is a Server?
A server is a parking place for your website. (In fact - No server.. No website)
Hosting companies have servers for you to park your website so it can be seen on the internet. To get your website onto a server you have to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) This just means it's a method of transferring your files from your computer to the server.
The people who supply your internet connection sometimes give you a wee bit of "WEBSPACE" on their server for FREE! Which is fine if you just want a basic website..... with X5 you NEED PHP installed for the reserved area, mail etc...

A hosting company will give you PHP and other attributes for the server to help you create a more dynamic website.
(You definately need a Control Panel so you can look after the server yourself. People are put off by this but! I can assure you once you start looking round the panel you'll be surprised at just what it can do for you.... FREE! Blogs, Ecommerce and Forum websites!!)

If you look at the sketch on the left this is what you would have on a basic server..... Folders and HTML pages. As an example of an image link: When you insert an image on your webpage and upload it to the server, your image would go into the images folder. So the path to that image would be...... what your website is called first..... www.frankscybercafe.com then it would be in the images folder then the image name photo.jpg. So it would be: http://www.frankscybercafe.com/images/photo.jpg

The place where you upload to is the "ROOT" folder on your server and can be called lots of names e.g. public_html, www, htdocs etc..... sometimes it doesn't even have a name!! This depends on what company you are parking your website with. The "ROOT" Folder is the "INTERNET" This is what you are seeing through your browser. So a webpage called contact.html will be: www.frankscybercafe.com/contact.html
When you install a Blog into a folder (sub-directory) you just need to put the folder name e.g. www.frankscybercafe.com/blog as the browser will look for the index - homepage automatically and pick it up! If you make a mistake and don't insert an index page nothing will show!!

You have the opportunity to create your own folders (sub-directories) to insert other websites, music, video files etc... etc...
So with X5 you can build as many websites as you wish and put them in other folders on your server. Then if you do a website for your pets create a folder upload your pets website and then insert in your address bar of your browser: www.frankscybercafe.com/pets and there it will be! Purchase a Domain Name point it to your pets folder and another website goes on the internet!!!

I hope you can understand a little bit better now on the workings of a server and how important it is to your website!!