Once your webhosting account is purchased, there will likely be a few tasks to which you must attend to get your site up and running. With shared hosting, most of these tasks will likely be laid out for you and can be accomplished by using simple web interfaces. What you actually have to do will depend upon your provider, but some tasks are very common.

You’ll need to upload your site, obviously, and that will likely require you to use FTP. FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. It has been the standard for uploading files to web servers for many years. Likely, your web server will require you to create an FTP user to upload files. Check your host’s site to see where and how this is done. It’s better to create a separate user account for FTP than to use the administrator account. You’ll likely have to give FTP access to designers and other personnel and you don’t want to give out your administrator account information which likely has access to billing information.

You may need to point your domain name to the IP address of your server. Sometimes this will be done by the web host and, because the task can be very complex, it’s usually easy to get tech support to walk you through this. If you have no idea what a domain name or IP address is, call tech support and see if they can help you set up your new address.