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Congratulations and thank you for purchasing a shared hosting account from hosting.com! This article will help you get started configuring your web site.
If this is your first site, What makes a website appear online? explains how hosting, domains, and DNS fit together, and the web hosting glossary covers the terms used below.

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Hosting Panel

After you purchase a shared hosting package from hosting.com, you receive a Welcome e-mail message that provides information about how to access your account on the hosting.com Hosting Panel. The Hosting Panel enables you to view your account’s product information, including:
  • Your username.
  • Nameserver information.
  • Server name for your account.
  • Account IP address.
  • Account domain name.
For more information about how to use the Hosting Panel for your shared hosting account, please see this article.

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Configuring name server settings

For your web site to work correctly, you must configure your domain name (for example, example.com ) to use hosting.com’s name servers. For more information about how to set a domain’s name servers to point to hosting.com, please see this article.

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Managing your web site

You manage your web site from the Hosting Panel at https://my.hosting.com — files, email, databases, domains, and WordPress all in one place, with no separate login. See Managing your website in the Hosting Panel to get started. If your account includes cPanel, you can use that instead; see Accessing cPanel.

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Accessing your account

You can access your account in a number of ways: SSH (Secure Shell), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and more. For information about how to access your account, please see this article.

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Setting up e-mail

E-mail is an important part of running a web site, and we make it easy to set up and manage accounts. You create them in the Emails section of the Hosting Panel — see Managing your email in the Hosting Panel. If your account includes cPanel, see Managing e-mail accounts in cPanel instead.

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Publishing your web site

To publish web site files and make them publicly viewable, upload them to your account’s public_html directory. You can update your web site files whenever you want. However, please note that any files you upload that are not in the public_html directory (or in a subdirectory beneath public_html) are not publicly viewable. If you already have a web site with another hosting provider and are moving it to hosting.com, you may want to migrate your web site data to your new account. For information about how to do this, please see these articles.

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We’re here to help!

If you get stuck on something, or just have a question about how something works, we’re here for you. You can always open a support ticket on the hosting.com Hosting Panel at https://my.hosting.com.