Making Your Web Server Files Visible on the Web
For security and simplicity, your Web-visible files are stored in a separate directory tree from your home directory.
In any Web (server) directory, the server looks for a default file with one of these names:
index.html
index.shtml
index.cgi
index.php3
index.phtml
index.htm
home.html
welcome.html
… in that order. If no file can be found, a directory listing will be returned instead. Please note that Unix is case-sensitive. This means that if you name your index file Index.html, you will still see the directory listing, instead of the index page. For simplicity and to follow standards set by most browsers, you should always use lowercase names for your files.