Congratulations and thank you for purchasing your hosting account from IndicHosts.net. Here is how to get started with your web hosting account. Please read these steps carefully before contacting us with any questions.
Configuring Your Domain Name
If you elected for us to register your domain, we will point it to the correct server for you. If you have only ordered web hosting or are transferring your domain to us, here is what you need to do.
Set the domain's nameserver at the domain registrar, to that specified in the hosting Account Activation email.
Most domain registrars provide you with a place to login and manage your domain's name servers. If you don't know how to do that or do not have a place to login and manage your domain, please contact the place where you registered your domain from and tell them to change your domains name servers to ours. Please do not contact us if you did not register your domain with us as we cannot help you transfer it, this must be done by the company that registered it.After changing name servers or registering a new domain name, it will take at LEAST 24 hours before you will be able to see your domain by going to http://www.yourdomain.com/. This process normally takes between 24-72 hours, but can sometimes take up to 5 days. This delay, referred to as a DNS propagation delay, occurs with all hosts and is outside of our control. During this period, you may also experience intermittent connection to your domain. That is, it may become available, then disappear again a few hours later. This is also an artifact of the DNS propagation and will typically resolve itself within a few days after assigning the new name servers.
Until your domain fully resolves (1-5 days from the time you changed it) you will NOT be able to do the following:
- View your domain at http://www.yourdomain.com/
- Check your mail (POP3, SMTP and Webmail will NOT work)
- Publish using FrontPage extensions.
Creating Your Web Pages
If you don't already have a website, and are wanting to build your own, you will probably need some HTML authoring software. There many such programs available on the internet. A few recommendations for varying budgets are listed below:
- AceHTML, HomeSite or Dreamweaver are good web authoring software. They will fit yur budget and deliver a professional product. Dreamweaver comes highly recommended.
- If your an expert, you will want to use a program like Notepad++ or UltraEdit to make your web pages.
- If you prefer you can get started but installing one of the +250 free scripts at a single click via Softaculous in your hosting control panel "cPanel". Softaculous provide quick installation of blog, shopping carts, forums, mailing-list, CMS, LMS and many more professional software. Thereafter you can read on teh software documentation and proceed to tweak it content, colors, images and other features to suit your needs.
Uploading Your Files
Once you've got your website ready, you can upload it onto our servers.
Despite the fact the you will not be able to access your domain via its name immediately after signing up, you can already start uploading your files onto the server using the ip address. Once your domain name starts pointing to our servers, your site can already be set to go.
Below are step by step instructions on how to FTP your files.
- Run your favorite FTP program (if you don't already have one, we recommend free FileZilla)
- In the FTP program, set the FTP Host to your IP Address given in hosting activation email.
- Type in your username and password (they are listed in your hosting activation email).
- Click connect
- After you have connected you will see several files and folders.
- Open the "public_html" folder for Linux & "www" folder for windows.
- Upload your files to this directory. Be sure that you have created a file called "index.html" or "index.htm" or "index.asp" or "index.aspx". This file will be viewable at your domain (http://www.yourdomain.com/). Also be sure all letters are lowercase (for example Index.html is not the same as index.html).
- Until your domain name has fully resolved, you can access your webpages at http://ipadress/~yourusername/ for Linux and create a temporary url in HELM for Windows
Setting Up Your Email Account(s)
Login to the control panel and take a look around (your username and password can be found in your hosting activation email). You can set up any mail accounts you would like, but please remember they will not work until your DNS fully transfers.
Here are directions on how to set up a POP3 email account:
- Login to the site admin control panel at http://yourdomain.com/cpanel or http://cp.domainname.com after your domain name has fully resolved.
- Click the "Mail" icon.
- Select the "Add / Remove Accounts" link.
- This shows a list of your current email addresses. Note: A default email address has been created for you which is the same as your username. All unrouted email (i.e. all email sent to anything@yourdomain.com) will be forwarded to this address.
- Type the username you would like for your email account. For example if you want the email address "webmaster@yourdomain.com" you would create a user called "webmaster". Create a password and click "Create".
- You have just created a POP3 Email account. You can check it using your webmail or a POP3 Client, with the following settings:
POP3, IMAP Server: mail.yourdomain.com (or ip address if your domain name has not yet resolved)
SMTP Server: mail.yourdomain.com (or ip address if your domain name has not yet resolved)
To check your newly created POP email addresses, set your username and password in your email program to those that you created in CPanel. For the above example, your username would be: webmaster@yourdomain.com. If you have not created any individual email accounts, and would like to just receive all email sent your domain, simply set your username and password to those supplied with your indichosts.net account.
- If you are using a POP3 Email client to send mail, Under your software settings for the SMTP server, be sure "My Server Requires Authorization" is selected. Otherwise you will get an error when you try to send mail.
Alternatively, you may wish to simply forward any mail directed to yourdomain.com to an existing email account. If you choose to do this, you will not need to make any changes to your email software.
- Login to the hosting control panel at http://ipaddress:2082/ (or http://yourdomain.com/cpanel after your domain name has fully resolved).
- Click the "Mail Manager" icon.
- Select the "Forwarders" link.
- Click on "Add Forwarder"
- Enter your username in the first box to the left of the @yourdomain.com, then in the box to the right, enter the email address you would like the mail forwarded to.
- Click on "Add Forwarder". Once your domain name has fully resolved you will be able to test if you've done it correctly simply by sending some email to anything@yourdomain.com
Free account transfer from existing provider
IndicHosts.net is pleased to offer free website transfer with settings, files, emails and databases intact from your existing provider if coming from hosting control panel cPanel. After you get your account activation email just contact Customer Support department and provide your old hosting cPanel login username and password and we will move you over semalessly without any downtime.
Remember, ff you need further assistance we are righ here to make you transisition as easy as possible, please raise a support ticket.
