Creating Web Sites and Home Directories on the Target Server

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

Each Web site must have one home directory. The home directory is the central location for your published pages. It contains a home page or index file that welcomes visitors and contains links to other pages in your site. The home directory is mapped to the Web site's domain name or to the name of the Web server.

Create a Web site and home directory on the target server by completing the following steps:

  1. Create the folder that will be the home directory for the Web site on the target server.

    The folder that is the home directory of the Web site contains all of the content and subdirectories for the Web site. The folder can be created on the Web server or on a UNC-shared folder on a separate server. At a minimum, create the folder on the following:

    • An NTFS file system partition, which helps ensure proper security.

    • A disk volume other than the system volume, which reduces the potential of an attack on a Web site bringing down the entire Web server, and improves performance.

    For more information about securing Web sites and applications see Securing Web Sites and Applications. For more information about creating directories for your Web sites see Create a Web Site.

  2. Determine whether to generate the Web site identification number incrementally, or from the Web site name.

    Although site identification numbers were generated incrementally in IIS 5.1 and earlier, when you create a new site on IIS 6.0, a Web site identification number is randomly generated by using the name of the Web site. If you have administration scripts, setup programs, or provisioning scripts that depend upon the IIS 5.1 method of generating site identification numbers, you can force IIS 6.0 to use incremental site identification numbers by creating the IncrementalSiteIDCreation registry entry in the subkey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\InetMgr\Parameters with the data type REG_DWORD and the value set to 0x1.

    For more information about configuring the Web site identification number see Configure the Web Site Identification Number.

  3. Create the Web site on the target server.

    Configure the Web site to have the same configuration as the corresponding Web site on the source server. For more information about how to create a Web site, see Create a Web Site.

  4. If the Web site on the source server is FrontPage extended, then configure the Web site on the target server to be FrontPage extended.

    For more information about how to configure a Web site to be FrontPage extended see Configure a Web Site to be FrontPage Extended.