A newbie question

[walt4599]

Ok, so at the college I goto, they taught us how to whole net process works with linking web pages together and uploading to your host, ect. But I have one question that seems host/provider specific. Where do I change my actual home page at? When I goto www.website.com I want it to redirect to www.website.com/index.htm, or have the clean URL be a page in it's own.

Is there someone out there that understands my problem? It's probably garbled but that's mainly because i'm flustered.. lol

[Bob Barr]

Ok, so at the college I goto, they taught us how to whole net process works with linking web pages together and uploading to your host, ect. But I have one question that seems host/provider specific. Where do I change my actual home page at? When I goto www.website.com I want it to redirect to www.website.com/index.htm, or have the clean URL be a page in it's own.

Is there someone out there that understands my problem? It's probably garbled but that's mainly because i'm flustered.. lol

When you point the browser at www.website.com, the server will send the file index.html to the browser by default. Any changes that you make to file index.html will be displayed when the browser accesses it.

[felgall]

There is actually a list of files it looks for and it displays the first one from the list that it finds. If it doen't find index.html it will look for index.htm etc.

[Bob Barr]

There is actually a list of files it looks for and it displays the first one from the list that it finds. If it doen't find index.html it will look for index.htm etc.

Thanks for the additional information.

Do you happen to have a link where the list of file names and their search order is documented? I've always been a bit fuzzy on just what files are in the list and the order in which they are searched.

[felgall]

I am not sure what list BlueHost uses as a default but there is an article at http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/kb/inde...od_id=2&id=207 that tells you how you can override that list with your own.

[Early Out]

FWIW, I went hunting for the BH default list, and couldn't find it, either. I'm guessing that default.htm* comes before index.htm* (which is non-standard for Apache), but I have no idea whether that's correct, and I don't know where things like Index.html or index.php fit into the sequence.

[wysiwyg]

These are what I checked, in the order they are served.

1. index.html
2. index.shtml
3. index.pl
4. index.plx
5. index.ppl
6. index.perl
7. index.cgi
8. index.php3
9. index.php4
10. index.php
11. index.htm
12. default.htm
13. default.html
14. home.htm

I wouldn't rely on this being static, or even the same across servers.
If you want to be sure, you need to define your own list using DirectoryIndex.