Hosting Your Web Page

When you visit a Web site, the pages are stored on a computer that is publicly accessible via the Internet. Pages are delivered by a special program called a Web server. Your Web browser, whether it is Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, AOL, or some other browser, contacts the Web server and asks that it deliver a particular Web page. The page is then delivered by the Web server to your browser, which loads it and displays it to you.

Each Web server has an Internet address identified in the URL. In the case of Google’s Web site hosting, your pages are hosted by the Web server found at googlepages.com.

Note 

Web servers may actually consist of many computers and Web servers to handle large traffic loads. These are known as server farms. They do not affect how visitors view your site.

Web pages for your site are stored in a particular folder located on the Web server. This folder is identified by the first part of the URL: Yoursitename.googlepages.com.

This directory is created by Google automatically using your Google ID. Individual pages are identified by their page names. The page names appear after googlepages.com and are separated by a forward slash like this: http://yoursitename.googlepages.com/newpage.

Note 

You may notice that your home page does not display a page name in the URL. This is because a standardized default name (usually index) is used to name your home page. Web servers know to look for an index page when no page name is specified by the Web browser. So going to www.somesite.com, for example, actually loads www.somesite.com/index.

You don’t have to be hosting your Web page on Google in order to use Page Creator. When your site is hosted by a different Web hosting service, you can create your pages using Page Creator and then copy the HTML into files that you deliver to your Web hosting service. Web hosting services vary. Some hosting services have Web-based editing capabilities, in which case, you have three choices:

• Edit the HTML of your pages made with Page Creator.

• Copy and paste the HTML from Page edit into the Web-based editor provided by your hosting service.

• Save the changes in your hosting service editor.

Some Web services require that you transfer completed files to them via some file transfer utility. Sometimes, that transfer utility is FTP (File Transfer Protocol), or you may have to use an HTML upload utility. In either case, you should copy the HTML (according to the steps listed previously) into a text file. Save the text file with the filename you want to transfer to your Web site.

Web pages normally have a file extension. File extensions used on the Web may vary depending on the technology used to create them. The file extension used mostly with HTML pages is .html or .htm. These extensions do not normally appear using the Google hosting service. For this reason, you may need to manually change any links created by Page Creator to have a file extension expected by other Web servers.