<P> The uniform resource locator (URL) of a home page is most often the base - level domain name, such as https://wikipedia.org . Historically it may also be found at http://domain.tld/index.html or http://domain.tld/default.html, where "tld" refers to the top - level domain used by the website . </P> <P> If a home page has not been created for a web site, many web servers will default to display a list of files located in the site's directory, if the security settings of the directory permit . This list will include hyperlinks to the files, allowing for simple file sharing without maintaining a separate HTML file . </P> <P> A home page also refers to the first page that appears upon opening a web browser, sometimes called the start page, although the home page of a website can be used as a start page . This start page can be a website, or it can be a page with various browser functions such as the display of thumbnails of frequently visited websites . Multiple websites can be set as a start page, to open in different tabs . Some websites are intended to be used as start pages, such as iGoogle (now defunct), My Yahoo!, and MSN.com, and provide links to commonly used services such as webmail and online weather forecasts . </P> <P> In the early days of the World Wide Web in the first half of the 1990s, an important part of web pages belonged to students or teachers with a UNIX account in their university . System administrators of such systems installed an HTTP server pointing its root directory to the directory containing the users accounts . On UNIX, the base directory of an account is called "home", and the HOME environment variable contains its path (for example / home / my_username). The URL of the home page usually has the format https://example.edu/~my_username/ . Thus the term home page appeared and then spread to its current usage . </P>

The first web page of any organisation is