Upload your website files

There are two ways to get your website's files onto your hosting account: the file manager in your browser, or an FTP client on your computer. Both put files in the same place.

Where your files go

Your site is served from a public folder in your account — commonly public_html, or a folder named after your domain. Anything placed directly inside it is reachable on the web, so a file saved there as about.html appears at yourdomain.com/about.html. Files kept outside that folder are stored but never served.

Option 1 — the file manager

Open your hosting service in the Goji dashboard and choose the File manager shortcut. It signs you into the control panel's file manager directly, with no separate password to remember.

Open your public folder, upload your files, and if you have uploaded a .zip, extract it there. This is the quickest route for a handful of files or a single archive.

Option 2 — FTP

For a large site, or if you would rather work from your own editor, use an FTP client such as FileZilla. You need four things, all of which are on your service page in the dashboard: the host, your username, your password and the port.

Connect, open the public folder on the right-hand side, and drag your files across. An FTP client handles hundreds of files far more gracefully than a browser, and it will resume where it left off if the connection drops.

A few things worth knowing

• Upload the contents, not the folder. If you upload a folder called mysite, your pages end up at yourdomain.com/mysite/. Open it first and upload what is inside.
• Your home page must be named index. A web server looks for index.html or index.php. A file called home.html will not load on its own.
• Uploading a .zip is faster. One large file transfers far more quickly than a thousand small ones, and the file manager can extract it once it arrives.
• Nothing appears? Check that you are in the public folder and not one level above it. This is the most common reason for an empty page after a successful upload.