Pitt Web Hosting

Here is the quick and dirty version of how to use your web hosting from Pitt. You get 5 MB of storage on Pitt's servers. If there is a bandwidth limit, I don't know about it. Your website will be located at the following address:

http://www.pitt.edu/~username

Obviously your Pitt username goes into the address. You need to leave the tilde in, though. So for example, my username is jjf19. Thus, my web address is http://www.pitt.edu/~jjf19. To get started, you first need to access Pitt's server. The address is:

ftp://unixs.cis.pitt.edu/

The easiest method is to just plug this address into an FTP client. You can use your normal Pitt username and password (like you would use to access your Pitt email) to log into the server. On the server, you'll likely have a few folders already created. One of them should be named public. In your public folder, you'll need to create another folder called html. The folder structure will then look like this:

Within this HTML folder will go all of the .html, .js, and .css files for your web page. You can create additional folders inside of this to better organize your files if you wish. The big thing to note is that your homepage MUST be called index.html. This is the file which will be shown when you enter in your page's address. So basically

http://www.pitt.edu/~username

ACTUALLY goes to

http://www.pitt.edu/~username/index.html

You just have to make sure it is named as such so that the system knows what to display. Hopefully this is helpful to anyone who is interested. I tried to keep it short and simple, but that means I also made a lot of assumptions about what people know. If you have any questions or experience any problems trying to set this up feel free to post in the comments and I'll try to help you out as quickly as I can.