Hands on: Take control of your server

First steps
First things first: your server is likely to have a domain name that means nothing to you, although it will be more useful to the technical support team ­ it will tell them where to find it in the equipment rack. But the IP address is all important; on a cheap hosting package, you’ll probably only have one, but you may have been allocated more.

Essentially, you can share an address between many websites, but you can only have one secure certificate on each, so if you have two websites that will need https, you’ll need two IP addresses.

Stage one is making sure that your domain name points to your web server; we’re not going to worry about email at the moment. Conventionally, you’ll want www.yourdomain.wherever to point to the web server, but you might also want to arrange it so that people can access your site without the ‘www’.

So, you need to log in to the web control panel for your domain registrar, and ­ depending on the options on offer ­ add an ‘A’ record for ‘www’, the name of the host, and give the IP address of your new server. You may simply have a ‘web forwarding’ option, and if that allows you to enter an IP address, then enter the one that’s allocated to your server.

If you want the site to be accessible without the ‘www’, add an ‘A’ record for just the domain name itself, with the same address.

Now, once the updates to the DNS take place, if someone types in the name of your website, they’ll be taken to the home page of your web server ­ and they’ll most likely see a basic ‘under construction’ or ‘just registered’ page. That’s because the server won’t have a clue about which domains it is supposed to provide pages for.

When a web browser requests a page, it contacts the server and passes the name of the file it requires, as well as the domain ­ so you have to tell the server to respond to the domain name as well.

How you do this will depend on the server admin tool you’re using; for this part of the example, we’ll use the Plesk system, which is on Linux servers from 1 &1, one of the popular web hosts. You first have to sign in to their control panel, which will provide you with the details of your server, and a link will take you to the server’s own control panel. From there, you simply sign in to Plesk; if you bookmark the sign in screen, you can go there directly in future without having to bother with the 1&1 control panel.

In Plesk, you have to create ‘clients’, who then create domains. So, the first thing you need to do is click the Clients link in the left-hand pane, then Add New Client Account to create a client with your own name. You can choose which of your IP addresses on the server are available to which client; if you have more than one, add them all.