Guide
How to host a school project website
A site your teacher can open from a link, online in an evening, with nothing to pay and nothing to install.
- Name your main page
index.htmlexactly, and put it in the root of your project folder. - Use only lowercase letters in every filename and every link, because our servers run Linux and treat capitals as different files.
- Upload your entire project folder at once using FTP over TLS or the web file manager, not individual files one by one.
- Keep the original files on your own machine — there are no backups and the account is deleted after 45 days of no activity.
You have a deadline, a laptop, and a set of HTML files that need to be on the internet so your teacher can open them. This guide is the shortest path from those files to a working URL.
What you need before you start
You need a website already built on your own machine. If you are still writing the HTML, the static website guide covers what a plain HTML site needs. For a school project, plain HTML is enough. No PHP, no database, no frameworks.
You also need the files to be organised. A folder on your desktop called project with everything inside it is fine. The most important file in that folder is index.html.
The file that must exist: index.html
When someone visits a directory on a web server, the server looks for a default file to serve. That default file is index.html. If it is not there, the server does not show your other files — it returns a 403 Forbidden error. That is the error your marker will see if you forget this file.
Checklist:
- Your home page must be named exactly index.html. Lowercase i, lowercase n, lowercase d, lowercase e, lowercase x, full stop, html.
- It must be in the root of your project folder, not inside a subfolder.
If you have other pages, they can be named anything. But the main entry point must be index.html.
The thing that breaks more student sites than everything else
Windows and macOS do not care about capital letters in filenames. About.html and about.html are the same file to them. Linux, which runs our servers, treats them as two completely different files.
You link to About.html in your navigation. Your file on disk is called about.html. On your laptop it works fine because the operating system is case-insensitive. On the server it returns a 404 Not Found error. Your marker sees a blank page.
The fix is simple: use only lowercase letters in every filename and every link. No capital letters at all. contact.html, style.css, logo.png. Then every link you write will match the file on disk.
This rule applies to everything you upload. Images, CSS files, JavaScript files, everything.
Uploading your files
You get 1 GB of storage and a limit of 30,000 files. A school project will not come close to either number.
Use FTP over TLS. Your school network might block FTP. If it does, use the web file manager in the control panel instead. Either way, upload your entire project folder. Do not upload individual files one at a time — upload the folder and let it copy everything.
Once the upload finishes, visit your site URL. If you see your index.html content, you are done. If you see an error, check the two things above first: does index.html exist in the right place, and are all your filenames lowercase?
Adding a title and description for the marker
Your marker might open the page in a browser with ten other tabs. Give your page a <title> tag in the <head> section of your HTML. That is what appears in the browser tab. Use the meta tag generator to add a description too. It is not required, but it makes your site look complete.
What happens to your account after the school project
You get three accounts per person. The account is deleted after 45 days with no login and no traffic. You will get email warnings at 30, 40 and 44 days. For a school project that you submit and never touch again, that is fine. The deadline passes, the project is marked, and the account disappears.
What it means is that this is not a portfolio. If you want a website that stays up for years, you need paid hosting from someone else. CWP does not offer paid plans. There is no upgrade path.
Keep a copy of everything on your own machine
There are no backups. None. The server does not snapshot your files. If you delete something by accident, or if the account is deleted because you forgot to log in, the files are gone.
Keep the original folder on your laptop. Keep it after you submit. Your teacher will not give you extra time because a server lost your data.
Limits of hosting a school project
The free hosting is deliberately limited. These are the things that are not available: - Outbound email or SMTP. You cannot send a contact form to an email address. - Cron jobs. Nothing can run on a schedule. - SSH access. No command line. - Node, Python, Ruby, Go or any language other than PHP. - Backups of any kind. - Any uptime guarantee. The server has no published uptime figure.
These limits exist because the service is free. If your project needs any of these things, you need a different host. The free account is for static HTML sites and simple PHP applications that do not send email or run background tasks.