Knowledgebase

Most probably you have been wondering how the Webserver decides which page from your site
to use as a main/default page of your site.  There is a directive named DirectoryIndex
which takes care of this.

On most web servers there is a pre-defined set of file names which server a start page.
The most commonly used are: index.html, default.html, index.php, index.asp, etc.

The good news is that you can set your custom file to be a start page of your site using .htaccess.
For example the following line set home-page.html as a main page of your site:

DirectoryIndex home-page.html

The DirectoryIndex directive can accept more than one name:

DirectoryIndex home-page.html Home.html, index.html index.php index.cgi

So when a visitors goes to http://www.example.com the first page to be loaded will be the
home-page.html if it cannot be found the server will look then for Home.html, index.htm,
etc until it finds a match.