Hosting your website

Three ways to have a website

• Keep the site you have and add the widget to it.
• Let us host it. Upload your site in the dashboard. It gets a free web address straight away, and you can connect your own domain.
• Ask us to build it. Tell us what you want with Build it for me.

You can also run the host app on your own server if you'd rather keep the files on a machine you control.

Hosted sites get the widget added automatically. You can turn that off per site in Dashboard → Website.

Upload your site

In Dashboard → Website, drop in a .zip file or a folder with your site in it.

What we need:

• A home page called index.html at the top. If everything is inside one folder (which is what you get when you zip a folder), that's fine: we lift it up a level for you. If we can't find index.html, the upload stops and tells you so.
• Up to 150 MB zipped, up to 400 MB once unzipped, and up to 5,000 files.

What we leave out, so they never go live by mistake:

• Mac and Windows clutter: __MACOSX, .DS_Store, Thumbs.db
• .git folders and .env files

A zip that tries to write outside its own folder is rejected.

Big uploads go up in pieces, so a slow connection is fine. Your site goes live as soon as the upload finishes.

Roll back

Every upload is kept as a version. The dashboard lists your recent versions with their date, size and file count. Tap an older one to put it back live. The newer version isn't deleted, so you can switch back again.

How many sites

Your plan sets how many hosted sites you can have. If you reach the limit, the dashboard tells you. Message us if you need more.

Build it for me

Don't have a site, or don't want to touch one? Send a request from Dashboard → Website. You'll be asked for:

• which pages you want (Home, About, Services and Contact to start with)
• the look you're after, in your own words
• what your business does
• your current website, if you have one
• the domain you'd like to use
• logos and photos (PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF or SVG images, or PDFs, up to 15 MB each)
• anything else we should know

Your request goes through these stages, and you get an email each time it moves:

You can send messages and files back and forth on the request at any time.

Use your own domain

Your hosted site starts on a free address. To use your own domain, like joesplumbing.com:

1. Add the domain. In Dashboard → Website, enter it without www or https://, for example joesplumbing.com. The dashboard then shows a target to point at.
2. Point www at the target. At the company where you bought the domain (your registrar or DNS host), add a CNAME record for www whose value is the target from the dashboard.
3. Forward the bare domain. Most registrars can't point the bare joesplumbing.com at a CNAME. Use the registrar's forwarding (or "redirect") feature to send joesplumbing.com to https://www.joesplumbing.com.
4. Check it. Back in the dashboard, tap the domain check. It shows what your DNS says right now for both names, and turns ready once www points at the target.

Your DNS records end up looking like this (the target value is an example; use the one in your dashboard):

• DNS changes usually show up within an hour, but can take up to a day.
• The secure https:// certificate is set up for you once the DNS change is live.
• Each domain can be connected to one site only. If it's already connected elsewhere, the dashboard says so.