Does a website cannot be located without index.html

[ADQUSIT]

Hi. I have heard that if your website does not have index.html or index.php page so your website cannot be located on server. It is indispensable to make this page. Is it true?

[SambaNeko]

Not true at all. A DirectoryIndex can be set to any file you want, so it doesn't need to be "index.[anything]." You can also omit index functionality and make the directory contents viewable instead. Furthermore, even if you don't do either of the above, other public pages on your site are still findable and accessible.

[jmsrickland]

I just went to my web site and renamed index.html to something else and I was not able to navigate to my web site.

[techgnome]

web servers generally have a setting that controls what the default document is. it's usually index.* .... html, htm, php, asp, aspx, and so on... if it can't find the first one, it rolls down the line until it reaches the end of the list. I've messed with this setting before so that it used default.html as the default document... so you can set it to anything you want.

You get an error when the server cannot find any of the files that you've specified as the default document. that doesn't mean you can't navigate to it directly though... it just won't do it automatically.

-tg

[jmsrickland]

that doesn't mean you can't navigate to it directly though... it just won't do it automatically.

-tg

What does directly mean? If my index.html is missing how then do I navigate directly to my web site?

[techgnome]

http://www.mywebsite.com/somefilethatisntindex.htm <-- that's what I mean by directly....

OK... fair enough, I wasn't clear in what I said... in my head I knew what I meant... what I should have said was this:
that doesn't mean you can't navigate directly to the file though

-tg