NOTE: This article is written for our Classic Cloud Control Panel. You can access this interface from the New Cloud Control Panel by clicking your username in the upper-right of the control panel and choosing the previous control panel from the menu.

Now that you have successfully created your domain in Cloud Sites, you will most likely want to begin uploading content to your website. This article will show you how to locate your FTP (File Transfer Protocol) credentials and connect to the Rackspace Cloud FTP servers.

In order to add content to your web site you will need to log in with an FTP client using your FTP settings. Let's start by showing you where you can locate your FTP settings.

To find your domain's FTP settings follow these easy steps:

1.   Log in to the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel

2.   Navigate to Hosting->Cloud Sites

3.   Click on the domain you will be adding content to

4.   Then look under the General Settings tab. Your FTP settings are listed right under the Viewing and Editing section.

NOTE: There are two FTP servers you can use to add content to your site:

• The FTP server specific to your domain. This server will be ftp. and then your domain name (for example, ftp.yourdomain.com), and can only be used after your domain registration or transfer is completed.
• The general or secondary FTP site is ftp1.ftptoyoursite.com. This server can be used to add content to your site even if your domain registration or transfer has not yet completed.

There are various settings that must be set to allow your FTP program to connect to our servers:

• Passive mode must be turned on to log in to our FTP servers. Passive mode will allow for your computer to navigate through our firewalls.
• There are a variety of ports that could be utilized for FTP traffic, however, we have chosen to stay with the standard port 21. Most FTP clients will have this port selected as default.

Once you have logged into your FTP server a list of websites associated with your username and password will be displayed. Choose the domain you wish to upload your website files into, open it and you will find three additional directories.

One of the three directories will be labeled "web". The other two folders are for server side stats and log reporting and should not be deleted or edited.

Open the "web" directory and you should see two more directories labeled "cgi-bin" and "content." If you have CGI or Perl files they will need to be uploaded into the "cgi-bin" folder. Your HTML, ASP, PHP, images and other web files should be uploaded into your "content" folder.

Here is a roadmap of the FTP server that will be very similar to your domain's layout:

 /www.yourdomain.com <-----Your domain's root directory
   /web
     /cgi-bin <----- CGI and Perl files go inside this directory

       /yourscript.pl
       /yourscript.cgi
     /content <----- Website files need to be uploaded into this directory
       /index.html
       /image.jpg
   /stats <----- Do not delete or edit
   /logs <----- Do not delete or edit

NOTE: By default, your site will have an index.html. In order to display your new content, please delete the default index.html or rename this to something like index.html.bak

That covers the basics of building your first website with Rackspace Cloud Sites. At this point, you should be fairly comfortable with Hosting Plans, and what they are used for as well as how to create new Hosting Plans and modify existing ones.  You've also successfuly added your first domain and connected to the FTP servers to begin uploading your content. 

Back to the First 48 Guide

On to the next section - Cloud Sites First 48, DNS and Domain Management