How to set up your Personal Web Page

Most Monterey Bay Internet accounts come with free space for you to host a personal web page. The address of this page is in the form of http://www.mbay.net/~username/, where username is your unique mbay.net username. (Your username is also the unique part of your email addres; ie, username@mbay.net).

Please note that these pages are for Personal use only, and do not have the same complete set of services that are available on our Virtual Web Servers.

Also, please note that your Personal Web Page is covered by our Terms of Service agreement, which you agree to by using your Monterey Bay Internet account in any manner.

Writing your Pages

There are many different programs available to help you design your web site. Experience web designers will usually use the simplest of all - a text editor, such as Notepad. Other options include Netscape Composer, the web page editor that is included with the Complete version of Netscape or Hot Dog, among many others. We regret that we can not provide assistance on using your page development software, due to the wide variety of choices that exist.

Note: We do not recomend using Microsoft Frontpage as it requires proprietary extensions to function properly, and it produces HTML code that is extremely inefficent and difficult to read.

Uploading your Pages

When you have written your pages and are ready to make them available for the world to see, you need to upload them to our server. There are a few different methods for doing this. The supported method is to use an external FTP client. You can also use the built-in FTP client included with most page development software. Or, you can use Windows File Sharing to simply drag your files onto our server.

Using an FTP client

To upload your web pages, connect to ftp.mbay.net (this may be called "host name", "server name", "address", or something else, depending on your client). Log in with YOUR username and password - "anonymous" will NOT work. Leave any selections for "remote directory" or similar blank. When you are connected to our server, you will be in your home directory on our server. From there, you should see a directory labeled public_html. This is the directory that your web page will be stored in. Open that directory, and you will ready to send us your files.

Now you need to upload the files for your page. The exact method needed to do this will vary depending on your FTP client, but you will need to select the files for your site on your computer, and then "Put" them on the server. Make sure you transfer any images (.jpg or .gif) files using binary mode. Most clients have an "Auto" option which should also work.

Using a built-in client

Netscape Composer requires a special "location" address for uploading files. If you are using Composer, enter ftp://ftp.mbay.net/home/u1/username/public_html/ in the Location field when publishing your page. Remember to substitute username with your username.

If you are using other page development software, consult the documentation included with the program for information on how to upload your pages.

Using Windows Filesharing

Server Configuration

The default index file (the file that is read if a user just accesses your site as http://www.mbay.net/~username/, without a filename), should be called index.html. If that file can't be found, the server will also look for index.htm, in case your operating system can't handle long filenames. If an index file is not present, the server will show the user a list of the files in your public_html directory.

We run Apache 1.3 on our web server. The full documentation is available at http://www.apache.org/. You can set certain server configuration directives yourself, using ".htaccess" files in your document directories. For example, if you want files ending in .foo to be served with the Application/Foobar mimetype, put a file called .htaccess in your document root, with the line
AddType application/foobar foo
in it. There are many other server directives you can set; consult the Apache documentation for more information.

We do not support the Microsoft Frontpage extentions for security reasons. While we understand that they make certain operations easier, we do not feel it is worth making our server and customers vulnerable to downtime and outside attacks. This does NOT mean that you can't use Frontpage to create your web pages; you just can't use the custom server extentions. See http://www.worldgate.com/~marcs/fp/ for more information on this problem.