FAQ/Beginner

UserPreferences

1. I've never had a website before. How do I get started?
2. How can I switch to Cornerhost from another hosting company?
3. What is DNS, and how does it work?
4. How does DNS relate to mail forwarding? (What's an MX record?)
5. how do file permissions work?

I've never had a website before. How do I get started?

First of all, you'll need to know a little bit about HTML. Luckily, HTML is just text. If you use your browser's "view source" command on any website, you can see how it's put together. So a lot of people learn just by cutting and pasting.

W3Schools has some great tutorials on web-related subjects.

You can also download a tool that creates HTML for you, such as the free trial of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

My set of NewbieTools used to create my first website ever as well as my current one - DominicFitzpatrick

Finally, if you just want to get some text up and aren't ready to take on HTML, you might try setting up a simple blog with Blogger

How can I switch to Cornerhost from another hosting company?

Easy!

1. First, fill out the signup form:

http://www.cornerhost.com/signup/

2. Make sure you fill out your domain, so we can set up a temporary domain: yourdomain.com.xyz.sabren.com
3. We'll send you a welcome letter with all the info you need to set up the account.
4. You copy your files over, using the temporary domain to get everything working.
5. When you're ready to go live, you change the DNS entries wherever you bought the domain, so your domain points to the new site.

What is DNS, and how does it work?

DNS is the system that maps domain names to individual computers. Basically, there are three parts to setting up DNS.

1. The domain registries. Purchasing a domain adds it to the master registries, but doesn't necessarily bind it to a particular machine on the internet. For that you need a NameServer. Each domain should have at least two nameservers. When you sign up at cornerhost, you'll have to log in to the registrar where you bought the domain and set your domain to use my nameservers (it's usually easy) which are NS1.SABREN.COM and NS2.SABREN.COM.
2. Domain nameservers (or DNS) are basically a huge network of machines that bind domains to individual IP addresses. Usually, these are run by hosting companies, or ISPs. When you add a domain to your cornerhost account, we configure our nameservers to point your domain at the right machine.
3. The machine itself, with the webserver, your pages/email/etc.

With web hosting, you deal with the Registry once to set up, cornerhost handles the actual DNS part, and then of course you control your files on the actual server.

How does DNS relate to mail forwarding? (What's an MX record?)

Correct. The way DNS works is this:

• someone asks, "what's the IP for xyz.com ?"

• the software goes to the DNS system and looks up the nameservers for xyz.com ... For example, they might be ns1.sabren.com and ns2.sabren.com if the site is hosted with cornerhost.
• The software then goes to ns1.sabren.com (and if that fails, it tries ns2) and asks the nameserver what the IP address is.

Normally everything goes to the same place: mail, web, ftp, etc... But if you want your mail to go somewhere else (say, godaddy) you can set up an MX record. That means that while the rest of the world thinks the domain is at cornerhost, mail programs will think the domain is at godaddy, and mail gets handled by their mail server.

But... You can also set up mail forwarding rules in the cornerhost control panel, and for most cases, that's all you need.

how do file permissions work?

If you run "ls -l" on your files from the shell or look in your ftp client, you'll see there are permissions on each file. It'll either be a string of letters and dashes, a three digit octal number or a bunch of checkboxes. In this case, the file is octal 666 or:

-rw-rw-rw-

That breaks down to:

-    = file, not a directory
rw-  = user (you) can read and write the file
rw-  = your group can read and write the file
rw-  = anyone (apache) can read and write the file

Likewise, octal 755 for cgi scripts maps to -rwxr-xr-x meaning you can read, write, and execute and apache can read and execute the file. (757 would let apache write AND read the CGI, a potential security hole!)

The middle number doesn't really matter on the servers here, since we don't use groups.

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