Tessisamess

• When you register to create a site with Altervista, you're given two free options: Wordpress managed hosting or Hosting with file manager. Which you pick is entirely up to you and depends on what you want your site for. The pricing you see on these options is not for your website. It's letting you know pricing for a domain name, should you want one, and is an optional feature you can utilize now or later.
• Put in the username you want in the next step, and you'll be given multiple options: An Altervista subdomain, or second-level domains of various extensions. If something isn't available it'll let you know. For instance: If mysite.com is already registered somewhere but mysite.net is not.
• Go grab your verification email, do as instructed, and then wait! You do not automatically get an account; instead, there's an approval process that can take up to 48 hours (it took less than 24 hours for me), which is likely because they're one of the very few free webhosts, and registering with bot accounts would be all too easy.
• Once your registration is complete, you'll get another email. It's time to get started!

• Searchbar Before anything else, I want to highlight that there is a search function up on the link menu that you can use if you forget where something is and you don't want to have to come check this page.
  
  
• DASHBOARD
  • Applications This module offers a link to your file manager, as well as your FTP settings. FTP is a desktop application (Filezilla is a great option that's been around for a long time) used to manage your site without your browser.
  • Resources Shows you how much space and bandwidth you're currently using, as well as links to upgrade each one in case you need more.
  • News Updates from Altervista.
  • Promote Submit your site to Google for search engine inclusion.
  • Earnings from Altervista Ad revenue if you're using the Altervista banner (more on that below).
  • Earnings from Google Ad revenue if you're using Google AdSense (more on that below).
  • FTP Your current FTP settings, as well as another link to edit those settings.
  • Statistics A graph of the traffic to your site, and a link to view in-depth stats, such as how many visitors you've gotten within a certain span of time.
  • Tools Toolbar management, which I haven't done, but it looks like an Altervista topbar for your site that allows recoloring and various widgets, like social media sharing and live clocks.
• RESOURCES
  • Space A link to your file manager, as well as shows you how much storage space you're currently using, and a link to upgrade.
  • Database Bro I'm ngl, I don't know. I think this is for MySQL, so 99% of the people using this walkthrough aren't gonna need it.
  • HTTPS The panel where you change over from HTTP to HTTPS; do this day one!! I have more information on this later, in the Add-Ons section.
  • Cron Jobs Most of you probably don't need this. It's basically scheduled scripts/commands set to run at specific times/dates/intervals.
  • Traffic Shows you how much bandwidth you're currently using, and a link to upgrade.
  • Backup This is where you can make a site backup in case you lose your content or need a previous version restored. There are paid options for this, so I'll explain more in the Add-Ons section.
  • PHP You can change which version of PHP you're working with here.
  • Domains Manage, create, and transfer domains here.
• WORDPRESS If you didn't choose Wordpress and you changed your mind, you can go here to switch. If you have chosen Wordpress, this page probably has a bunch of stuff on it. I didn't choose Wordpress, sorry! If you want me to, though, I can make another account to do that and check everything out.
• EARN
  • Altervista Banner Register for the site's ad program.
  • Altervista with Google AdSense Register for the Google's ad program.
• PROMOTE
  • Search Engines Check your site on search engines. Pinging lets search engines know your site exists. It can take a while for it to show up in the search results, so don't worry if you don't see it in the first week or two.
  • Social Networks Link to Facebook and/or Twitter. You have to be using Wordpress to use the Twitter link function.
• TOOLS
  • Toolbar Toolbar management, which I haven't done, but it looks like an Altervista topbar for your site that allows recoloring and various widgets, like social media sharing and live clocks.
  • Privacy & Cookie Policy Generate your own privacy and cookie policy for your site.
  • Favicon Edit Manage your favicon; this is the little icon next to your site's name up in the browser tab.
  • Alias Mail Make an alias email to forward to the email you signed up with. So, for instance, if you emailed tessisamess [at] altervista.org it would go to my gmail. You can turn this feature off at any time if you decide you don't want it anymore.

• SSL Certificate [Free] Do this day one! It's free and it makes sure IJ doesn't hate your image embeds. Turning on SSL (HTTPS instead of HTTP) is what gives your site the little lock icon that tells your browser that the site is safe.
• Storage Expansion [$6 USD per 1GB] Your Altervista site comes with 3GB of space to start you off; this is going to be more than enough for even the most prolific iconmakers but, if you're a screencapper with a lot of content, that might not be enough. Buying extra space is a one time payment, and you can expand by 100MB, 200MB, 300MB, 500MB, or 1GB. Since it's so low cost, it makes the most sense to just go 1GB at a time.
• Bandwidth Expansion [$3 USD per 10GB] Likewise, if your site gets a lot of traffic or hotlinking, you can expand your bandwidth. A lot of us probably won't need this if we're hosting icons and the like for other RPers, but it's great that we have the option for so little cost. You can upgrade in 1GB, 2GB, 3GB, 5GB, or 10GB increments. Again, this is a one time payment, and I'd just go with the largest one since the price is so low.
• Periodic Backup Management [$4, $7, or $18 USD per year] If you want more peace of mind knowing you'll always be able to recover previous versions of your site, then monthly, weekly, or daily backups are probably going to be vital to that sense of security. "With the periodic backup AlterVista takes care of creating your backup at regular intervals. You can restore your site with a click, bringing it back to the date of the last backup done."
  
  That being said, if you aren't in the market to add this to your site budget, you can just regularly download your site when making changes (you'll need to edit via FTP to do this). Personally, I'm super lazy so if I decide I need that backup security I'll just pay for it.
• Second-Level Domain Name [$22 USD per year] If you want to forego the Altervista subdomain, you can! To go from tessisamess.altervista.org to tessisamess.net, you'll be paying yearly rather than a flat fee, but it's pretty inexpensive. Hosting sites tend to advertise domain names as $10, but that isn't always the case.
  
  For instance, on my site each year I pay about $20 for my domain renewal, then my hosting renewal, then my SSL certificate renewal. It can add up fast, so I'd say since hosting is free, SSL is free, and expansions are super cheap one-time payments, $22/yr to go whole hog and get your own domain name to go with your hosting is an extremely good deal and well worth the money.
  
  So why don't I change hosts and save money? I'll be doing just that, actually! I want to use Altervista for a couple of months first before I commit though, since I host tools other people use and I want to be absolutely sure. (I know I'm sure, but I'm also a walking mess of anxiety lmfao.)
  
  But honestly? My longtime webhost just sold to another company without any warning to anyone, and they're consistently terrible at reminding customers about renewal, so I'm not super pleased with them and I want to leave. Going to my webhost and being abruptly redirected to a new host was kind of fucked up.

• Enable HTTPS and pay for any add-ons you want and are ready to pay for.
• Edit the index.html file to get rid of the Altervista site landing page. Throw whatever you want in there, or come back and do this step at any time. There's no real order any of this actually needs to be done in; I just like tossing in a lazy "coming soon" for while I'm getting my shit together.
• Decide on a favicon and upload it. Again, this can be done (or changed) at any time.
• Decide what language you're using for your site. I use PHP when making my sites, that way I can call certain HTML files onto every page without having to edit every page (like site footers and menu links), but most of you are probably going to be using HTML. You only need to decide what you want to do ahead of time to help you decide how you want to organize your files in the next step.
• Start setting up your file tree. For example, I'm using tessisamess.net (Not .com, that's my actual site!) as image hosting exclusively, so my file tree is set up for that purpose. This is just a standard folder system like you'd have on your computer, don't worry; nothing fancy. All screenshots used in this walkthrough are uploaded to tutorial-imgs on my hosting!
  
  
• You can forego the previous two steps if you're planning on using a pre-made template. I'll be coming out with a couple very soon, for instance, and they'll have their own file structure already. And, of course, you can add folders inside of folders if you need sub-directories.
• Start creating and/or uploading your content!

• To utilize your SSL encryption, you must use www in your URLs. Weird in 2023, but a small price to pay for free SSL. So https://www.tessisamess.net will utilize the SSL, while https://tessisamess.net will not.
• That being said: If you're linking images in img src tags, you actually don't need to worry if you forget the www in the URL. Both <img src="https://www.tessisamess.altervista.org/image.png"> and <img src="https://tessisamess.altervista.org/image.png"> will display the image on IJ without the site's SSL getting mad like it does with http URLs.
• Good news: If you previously linked stuff from Altervista using your subdomain name, but you want to move to a second-level domain, the old URLs will still work, as will visiting both tessisamess.altervista.org and tessisamess.net.
• That's because technically Altervista is still only offering domain forwarding when you get a second-level domain name like tessisamess.net; the difference is, back in the day when you put that in, the URL itself would redirect up in the searchbar. Now, the site forwards to your Altervista third-level domain hosting, but it keeps your URL as the one you paid for. For the kinds non-professional sites most of us would be using this for, the way they handle domains is more than good enough imo.
• You won't see an .htaccess file in your file manager, but you do have one! They've made an area specifically for it, which I honestly like more than having it in my home directory. You can find it by clicking the icon in your file manager.
  
  
• Making subdomains on Altervista is the one thing I find really disappointing. You can do it, but not with a second-level domain name. For instance, I was able to make previews.tessisamess.altervista.org but not previews.tessisamess.net. Keep that in mind if you want third-level domains.
  
  These are also a redirect service; keep that in mind! Going to previews.tessisamess.altervista.org would take you to the folder I specify on the site after creating somewhere for it to go: tessisamess.altervista.org/subdomains/previews (or it would if it still existed; I deleted it after testing).
  
  previews.tessisamess.net will not forward to previews.tessisamess.altervista.org.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.sitename\.altervista\.org$
RewriteRule (.*) https://www\.sitename\.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sitename\.altervista\.org$
RewriteRule (.*) https://www\.sitename\.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php