How To Create A Website On Atspace.Com For Free (Free) (Free Hosting) (For Free) (Freer) ( (Web) (Femalese) (Unpaid) (

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1 HO-3: Web Hosting In this hands-on exercise you are going to register for a free web hosting account. We are going to use atspace.com as an example, but other free hosting services work in a similar way (e.g etc). Paid web hosting services require a very similar registration with the added step of paying for the service. Registering for Free Hosting Below you can see the front page of atspace.com. You can register for free hosting by clicking on the Free Hosting title ( Figure 1: atspace.com front page Figure 2 below shows the form which you need to complete to sign up for a free hosting account: Figure 2: Registration Form Fill in all the details and click sign up. When complete, an will be sent to the address you provided on the form. This might take some time so be ITApps 2010/11 1

2 patient. Note: the might go to the spam directory of your , so do check there too! You need this , as it contains your password to sign-in the website. When the arrives, use the username you selected in the registration process and the password sent in the to log in using the form that appears at the top right of the website (Fig. 3). Be sure to select the Free Hosting User radio button. Figure 3: Login form Figure 4 below shows the control panel of the website, when you sign in. Figure 4: Control panel As a first step we need to register a free subdomain so that we can access our hosted website. Later we can associate one or more domains with the space. Associating a Free Subdomain Go to the Subdomain Manager (Fig. 5). Choose a name for your subdomain, e.g.: yumjuices: Figure 5: Subdomain Manager Note: you can also choose from a list of domain names from atspace. ITApps 2010/11 2

3 After you select your subdomain and click Create Subdomain a confirmation will appear telling you that your subdomain has been created. If an error appears, then possibly this subdomain is already taken, so you should either change the subdomain name, or choose another domain from the drop-down menu: If you click on the subdomain link in the confirmation window, you should go to the subdomain URL ( and you should see a page similar to that shown in Fig 6. Figure 5: This happens because there is nothing in your web space. This is when you have to upload your website! Note: There is no index.html in your web space. You have to create and upload one! ITApps 2010/11 3

4 Setting up Filezilla In order to upload your website, you need to use an FTP client. Alternatively, if you don t have access to an FTP client, you can use the File Manager provided, but this is NOT recommended. To find the relevant host details, click on the Back to Main Menu link, to go back to the Control Panel. Click FTP & and the information needed to connect using an FTP client will be listed (Fig 7). Figure 6: FTP information Note: although the bandwidth is unlimited for the free hosting option, there is a limitation for the size of the files you upload. For this host, it is 200kb. This should be enough for most text files (html, css, js, php, etc), but probably a struggle if you want to make a photo album. In this hands-on exercise we are going to use FileZilla to connect to your atspace domain. In this case, if your: subdomain name is dcsstusubdomain, you have chosen atspace.com as your domain, and your username is dcsstudent Then your FTP information that you need to enter into Filezilla is: Host: dcsstusubdomain.atspace.com Port: 21 User: dcsstudent Password: The password that was sent to your (although it is highly recommended to change it) Figure 7: Setting up a site in Filezilla ITApps 2010/11 4

5 Figure 8: Don't forget setting the transfer setting to Passive If all the information was correctly set, then you should successfully login to the FTP server when you click Connect. You should be able to see a folder in the server with the subdomain you chose. This is where you have to upload your website files. Uploading Content For now you are going to create a basic home page (index.html file) and upload this page into your atspace subdomain to replace the index.html page that is already there. Using Notepad++ or Dreamweaver, create a basic home page for your E-Business site. Note, if you prefer you can modify one of the pages you created in an earlier module, such as Introduction to Web Authoring. Don t worry if it is all a little basic at this stage, as you will do more work on and develop the index.html page during the remainder of the module as the home page for your e-shop you. Once you have found or developed an index.html use Filezilla to upload/ftp it into your atspace subdomain. Finally use Firefox to view your atspace website: (replacing mysubdomain with the name you have chosen, and see the index.html page you have uploaded. Comparing Hosting Packages As mentioned above free domain hosting packages have a number of limitations, to find out more details about this review the different packages and their fees on the atspace site ( and compare these with those provided by UK hosting services, such as webeden ( and fasthosts ( ITApps 2010/11 5