Hi, I was just wondering about this the other day. I have looked around before and some of these hosts who provide free hosting requires that you have an index.htm page up in your root folder.

I only have my test forum up and it's not in the root folder.

Is this ok?

Thanks.

Uhm, simple answer: No.

We do not require you to have an index page in your root folder. You just have to stay active and contribute to the forum.

An index page does help you in the root folder It prevents people from being able to browse through folder you have in your public_html folder. But that's all, personally I do recommend it. But as szupie said, it is not required.

It could also be an index.php file if you use forums which use php instead of static HTML.

Thanks for the replies. How about if I have no webpages there at all? Currently I only have my forum and a CMS up. Both are in folders in public_html.

Right now when I go to my site directly (root), I only get the Welcome to your Hosting Account! webpage. I guess they can't view my folders after all right?

Have you ever gone to a website and all you see is a directory listing of a bunch of files and folders instead of an actual webpage? That's what happens when you don't have an index page in your root folder. If you don't have an actual homepage up yet, you could always make a simple "Under Construction" or "Coming Soon" page. Personally, when I visit a site and see a directory listing, I tend to forget about it, but I bookmark sites that have coming soon or UC pages so I can see what the finished product looks like.

Best of luck

Ah but that is the standard preloaded index.html So you're all good WeaponX

The reason why other sites have no page loaded when you access them, but only a directory listing, is because they don't have any sort of default.* or index.* page loaded. if you delete all pages that begin with that, you'll get the same simple dir listing.

Just think of your index.htm page as being a place holder, a promise of things to come.

If you want to share your web address with people, it is a good starting point. You can put up one of those "under construction" type signs or come up with something unique.

You are limited only by your creativity. It might be fun to just have something on there, even if you never use the space beyond storage.

Just want to let you all know that I'm not a newbie at this. Didn't know there was a default index.htm page though. So that's why it showed that webpage instead LOL. Got it now.

I was only worried that my account will be deleted if I didn't have an index.htm file in the root folder. Some free web hosts do this.