Singapore Web Hosting Blog

Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting
the primary difference between dedicated and shared hosting is how the web server is used. with Shared web hosting, the web server is shared between many different websites. with Dedicated web hosting, the web server is dedicated to your web site. both have their advantages and disadvantages. dedicated hosting is of course much more expensive than shared hosting as you actually use the whole server.

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is a standard that allows a web server to execute an external program and send its output to the browser that requested it.

CGI was the original method of creating dynamic web applications. you can write a program in C/C++, Perl, or whatever language can run on your web server computer, and tell the web server to treat it as a CGI program.

Perl is the most popular language used to write CGI scripts.

Server-Side Scripting Languages
server-side scripting languages, such as PHP, ASP, are all intended to fulfill the same role as CGI without the burden of launching an external program for every request.

By installing a plug-in, the web server software knows how to do things like running programs written in Perl or PHP all by itself, instead of having to ask the operating system to run them as separate programs. when a web page containing one of these languages is requested, the web server uses its internal plug-ins to run the code in the page, then send the results to the Web browser.

Perl
Perl is a programming language that excels at manipulation of text. as such, it is ideal for the development of dynamic web pages. this isn’t to say that web development is the only application of Perl - it is heavily used in automation of administrative tasks on Unix-based systems, for example.

PHP
Personal Home Page (PHP) is a somewhat less flexible language than Perl, but is more specialized towards the creation of dynamic web pages. this focus means that you can do pretty much anything you can do with Perl using PHP.

designed for use as a server-side scripting language (whereas Perl was not originally designed for use on the web), this language bears similarities to other common languages (Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript) to make it easy for existing programmers to use.

ASP (Active Server Pages)
Active Server Pages (ASP) is a framework for running scripting languages as server-side scripting languages. developed by Microsoft, this is mainly supported by Windows web server. as a solution for creating dynamic web sites, ASP basically fills the same role as PHP, but with some degree of freedom in your choice of programming language. the trade-off is a loss of freedom in your choice of web server software.

we published an article on how to upload files to server on our site. it’s pretty easy to use ftp software actually, just read the article.

however, the free ftp software i mentioned in the article is not available any more. the vendor company has stopped providing the free lite version. they still offer paid version. 30 days trial download is free. but to be honest, paid version is not as easy to use as the free light version. you won’t do all those fancy stuff via ftp software, will you?

luckily, there’re still free ftp software. go to download.com and search for ftp.

we’ve got this question very often.

many clients ask, why my homepage does not show up when i surf to my domain? i’ve uploaded all my web pages. it’s saying “this domain is parked by singapore web hosting instead”.

first of all, the “this domain is…” page is temp homepage which is put into place automatically when clients’ hosting account is created. if you can see it, your domain is resolved to our server and working fine.

now why your still viewing this temp page after uploading your own web pages? a few possible reasons:

1)you upload to the wrong place. all web files (html, images, scripts, etc.) have to be uploaded to public_html directory. you can see the directory once ftp into your account.

we’ve included this point in order confirmation email, however, many clients miss it. i fully understand that. people tend to quickly go through document or faq and want to get things going fast, therefore some details are missed. me too…

2)the homepage has to be named as index.something

if you want your visitors to see the home page by typing http://www.yourdomainname.com/ instead of http://www.yourdomainname.com/mypage.html, you need to define a “default” page. on our servers (most of all servers actually), this page must be named as index followed by an allowable extension. allowable index page names include:

index.htm
index.html
index.shtml
index.cgi
index.php

if server cannot find an index file, it will simply list your entire web directory to everyone that accesses it, which is not so good.

and pls note, unix machine is case sensitive. if your account is on unix hosting plan, Index.htm will not work.

3)you may need to remove the temp index.html file (which says “this domain is hosted by…” as mentioned above), if your index file is named as index.php, index.shtml etc. because index.html would have higher priority than your own index file therefore the old temporary index.html would still be displayed if it’s still there.

4)refresh your browser. if you’ve above two correctly and still cannot see your own homepage, try refreshing browser, clearing computer cache.

still can’t get it work? open a support ticket