iFastHostingHow to upload your first website
Two ways to get your files onto your hosting account, which folder they belong in, and how to tell the upload actually worked.
Building a website and getting it onto your hosting account are two different jobs. Whatever you used to build the site — a static HTML template, an exported design, a coded project — none of it is visible on the internet until the files sit in the right folder on your hosting account. This is how to get them there.
Find out where the files belong
Every hosting account has a folder that the web server treats as the front door of your site, usually called public_html. Anything placed inside it is what a visitor sees when they load your domain. Files left anywhere else on the account are invisible to the outside world no matter how correctly they are written. See what is the public_html folder if this is the first time you have come across it.
If your site's files were exported inside their own folder — for example a folder literally named after your project — do not upload that whole folder into public_html. The result is a site that only appears at yourdomain.com/project-name instead of at the domain itself. Upload the contents of that folder directly into public_html.
Two ways to upload
The file manager
Your control panel includes a file manager that works in a browser, with no extra software to install. It is the quickest route for a handful of files or a single zipped archive, and it is usually the better starting point if this is your first time putting a site online.
- Open the file manager and navigate into
public_html(or the folder for the specific domain, if you are working with an addon domain). - Upload your files directly, or upload a single
.ziparchive and extract it in place — much faster than uploading hundreds of small files one at a time over a browser connection. - Confirm the files land at the correct level rather than nested inside an extra folder.
FTP or SFTP
For larger sites, or if you will be uploading updates regularly, an FTP client is worth setting up once. It handles large numbers of files more reliably than a browser upload and can resume an interrupted transfer instead of starting again from scratch.
Connecting with FTP covers getting your FTP details from the control panel and setting up a client. Once connected, the folder structure is the same as in the file manager — everything public goes inside public_html.
SFTP encrypts the connection, including your login details, in a way plain FTP does not. Most clients support both and the setup is nearly identical, so there is rarely a reason to choose the unencrypted option.
What a working homepage needs
The web server looks for a specific filename to treat as the homepage — typically index.html or index.php depending on what your site is built with. If that file is missing from the top level of public_html, visitors will see a directory listing or a generic placeholder instead of your site, even though the upload itself succeeded.
File and folder permissions
Most uploads keep sensible default permissions automatically. If a page loads as a blank screen or a "forbidden" error immediately after upload, permissions are worth checking — files generally need to be readable by the web server, and folders need to be accessible as well as readable. Your control panel's file manager will show current permissions and let you adjust them if something looks unusually restrictive.
Checking it actually worked
If your domain is not pointed at this hosting account yet, or you are not ready to make it live, you can still check the upload before switching anything over — see previewing a site before changing DNS. That lets you load the site by its server address rather than waiting on a domain change.
If the domain is already pointed here, load it in a private browser window rather than your normal one, since your browser may have cached an older result. A blank page, a listing of files instead of your site, or a "forbidden" message all point to one of the two issues above — wrong folder level or a missing index file — rather than anything wrong with the hosting account itself.
Uploading a database-driven site
If your site needs a database — WordPress and most other content management systems do — uploading the files is only half the job. You will also need to create a database and user in the control panel and configure the site to connect to it, which is a separate step from getting the files in place. For WordPress specifically, the one-click installer in your control panel does both steps together and is usually the faster route for a first install; see installing WordPress in one click.
If the upload has finished and the site still is not showing correctly, contact support with your domain name and what you are seeing, and we can check what the server is currently finding in your folder.
Related reading
It is the one folder on your hosting account that visitors can actually reach. Everything your site shows has to live inside it.
How to connect to your hosting with FTPA plain walkthrough of connecting to your hosting account with an FTP client, from finding your login details to seeing your files on the server.
Where do I upload my website files?Into the public_html folder, and nowhere else, if you want visitors to actually see what you have uploaded.
How to preview your site before changing DNSTwo ways to check a site works before a domain change goes live, so the domain switch is the last step rather than the first.