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### Setting Up Hosting Account for a Web Site

To host a web site on the server:

1. Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
2. Click Add New Domain in the Tools group.
3. Specify the domain name just as you have registered it. Leave the www check box selected if you wish to allow users to access your site by a common and habitual URL like www.your-domain.com.

   Having the www alias preceding your domain name will not cost you anything, but it will allow users to get to your site no matter what they type in their browsers: www.your-domain.com and your-domain.com will both point to your site.

4. If you have previously created a domain template and predefined all hosting features and resource usage allotments, select the required template from the Select template box.
5. If you have a number of IP addresses to choose from, select the required address from the Select an IP address drop-down box.

   Bear in mind that e-commerce sites need a dedicated IP address (not shared among other sites) to implement Secure Sockets Layer data encryption.

6. Make sure that there is a check mark in the Proceed to hosting setup check box and click OK.
7. Select the Physical hosting option to host the Web site on this machine and click OK.

   Upon completion of this procedure, your control panel will set up the domain name server on this machine to serve the new domain name and prepare the web server to serve the new Web site: a new zone file with appropriate resource records will be added to the Domain Name Server's configuration files, a web space will be created inside the Web server's directory, and necessary user accounts will be created on the server.

   Note: If your site is hosted on another machine, and you wish to set up your control panel's DNS server only to serve the DNS zone for that site, select either Frame forwarding or Standard forwarding option. With standard forwarding, a user is redirected to the site and the actual site's URL is shown in the user's browser, so the user always knows that he or she is redirected to another URL. With frame forwarding, a user is redirected to the site without knowing that the site actually resides at another location. For example: your customer has a free personal web site with his or her Internet Service Provider or a free Web host, and the Web site address is http://www.geocities.com/~myhomepage. The customer purchased a second level domain name www.myname.com and wants you to provide domain forwarding to his Web site. In this case you would normally choose the Frame forwarding service. See the section Serving Domain Names for Sites Hosted on Other Servers (Domain Forwarding) for details.

8. Specify the properties of a hosting account:
   - SSL support. Secure Sockets Layer encryption is generally used for protecting transfer of sensitive data during online transactions on e-commerce Web sites that run on dedicated IP addresses. SSL certificates that participate in the encryption process are usually applied to a single domain name on a single IP address, therefore, each site that needs SSL protection must be hosted on a dedicated IP address. An exception to this is subdomains, which you can protect with a wildcard certificate. Installing an SSL certificate on a Web server that hosts several web sites with different domain names on a single IP address (shared or name-based hosting) is technically possible, however, it is not recommended: the encryption will be provided, but users will get warning messages on attempt to connect to the secure site. To allow SSL encryption for Web sites, select the SSL support check box.
   - FTP/Microsoft FrontPage Login and FTP/Microsoft FrontPage password. Specify the user name and password that will be used for publishing the site to the server through FTP. Retype the password into the Confirm Password box.
   - Hard disk quota. Specify the amount of disk space in megabytes allocated to the web space for this site. This is the so-called hard quota that will not allow writing more files to the web space when the limit is reached. At attempt to write files, users will get the "Out of disk space" error. Hard quotas should be enabled in the server's operating system, so if you see the "Hard disk quota is not supported" notice to the right of the Hard disk quota field, but would like to use the hard quotas, contact your provider or the server administrator and ask to enable the hard quotas.
   - Access to system. This allows you to directly access the system through a Remote Desktop connection. However, allowing system access via RDP also poses a potential threat to the server security, so we recommend that you do not allow it, leaving the Login prohibited option selected.
   - SiteBuilder support. SiteBuilder is an efficient and user-friendly WYSIWYG web site editor running through the web interface. Leave the Publish site with SiteBuilder checkbox selected to be able to access SiteBuilder and build web site through your Plesk control panel interface by clicking SiteBuilder Wizard on the domain management page or clicking the Desktop shortcut in the SiteBuilder Admin navigation pane group. The version of SiteBuilder coming in the standard Plesk distribution is fully functional and its use is not limited in any way by the manufacturer (but domain administrators can be restricted from accessing it).
   - Microsoft FrontPage support. Microsoft FrontPage is a popular web site authoring tool. To enable publishing and modifying the site through Microsoft FrontPage, select the Microsoft FrontPage support and Microsoft FrontPage over SSL support check boxes, and set the Remote Microsoft FrontPage authoring option to allowed.

     Note. Microsoft FrontPage over SSL support is available only when SSL support is enabled on a domain.

   - Support for programming and scripting languages widely used in development of dynamic Web sites and server-side Web applications. Specify which of the following programming and scripting languages should be interpreted, executed or otherwise processed by the web server: Active Server Pages (ASP), Active Server Pages on .NET framework (ASP.NET), Server Side Includes (SSI), PHP hypertext preprocessor (PHP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Fast Common Gateway Interface (FastCGI), Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI), Perl, Python, ColdFusion and Miva scripting required for running Miva e-commerce solutions.

     Note. You can change the version of ASP.NET and PHP you want to use in the corresponding drop-down menu. You can also specify the mode for running PHP applications - CGI, FastCGI or ISAPI.

   - Web statistics. To allow you to view the information on the number of people visited the site and the pages of the site they viewed, select a module in Web statistics drop-down menu and select the accessible via password protected directory /plesk-stat/ checkbox, if required. This will install the selected statistical software module, which will generate reports and place them into the password protected directory. The domain administrator will then be able to access Web statistics at the URL: https://your-domain.com/plesk-stat/ using their FTP account login and password.

     Note. If domain administrator changes the FTP credentials, web statistics access credentials do not change. The original login and password specified upon the domain creation should always be used for accessing password-protected web statistics directory.

   - Custom error documents. When visitors coming to your site request pages that the web server cannot find, the web server generates and displays a standard HTML page with an error message. If you wish to create your own error pages and use them on your web server, select the Custom error documents check box.

     Note. You can enable the support for all programming and scripting languages, web statistics and custom error documents at once by selecting All services checkbox in the Services group.

   - Additional write/modify permissions. This option is required if customer's web applications are using a file-based database (like Jet) located in the root of `httpdocs` or `httpsdocs` folders. Please note that selecting this option might seriously compromise the web site security.
   - Use dedicated IIS application pool. This option enables the use of dedicated IIS application pool for your web applications. Using dedicated IIS application pool dramatically improves the stability of your web applications due to worker process isolation mode. This mode gives each web site hosted on the server the possibility to allocate a separate process pool for execution of its web applications. This way, malfunction in one application will not cause stopping of all the others. This is especially useful when you are using shared hosting package.
9. Click OK.

   Now your server is ready to accommodate the new web site, and the site owner can publish the site to the server. For instructions on publishing a Web site, refer to the Publishing a Site section of this guide.

   Note: If you transferred this domain name from another Web host, you will need to update the host DNS address with the domain name registrar so as to point to your name servers: log in to your registrar's web site, locate the forms used to manage the domain host pointers, and replace the current DNS host settings with your name servers' hostnames. The information on new name servers will spread across the DNS system within 48 hours.

If you have registered several domain names that you would like to point to a site hosted on this server, you should set up domain aliases. Refer to the Setting Up Additional Domain Names for a Site (Domain Aliases) section for details.

If you need to host several domains on your machine that will point to a site hosted on another server, you should set up domain forwarding. Refer to the Serving Domain Names for Sites Hosted on Other Servers (Domain Forwarding) section for details.

In this section: Limiting the Amount of Resources a Site Can Consume Allowing the Site Owner to Log in to Control Panel