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Tutorials & Information

This page lists tutorials and information that you may find useful in learning to use your hosting account.

Perhaps one of the first things you need to know is that your account resides on an LINUX operating system, that is running the APACHE Internet server. You can get version numbers and configuration information from within your control panel. Each hosting account has a control panel at http://yourdomain.tld/cpanel. You should become very familiar with cpanel and the large number of functions and tools it provides by keeping up with http://cpanel.net

To access your account at the most fundamental level - the terminal - you must have a Business Account (to gain shell access in the first place), then you need a terminal emulator that support SSH (Secure Shell). My favorite for use in Windows is PuTTY a free Telnet/SSH client available for essentially all Windows operating systems.

Once you have installed PuTTY you need to know how to 'talk' to Linux. A good starting point is 'The LINUX Tutorial'. You need to be aware that you have the power to completely destroy your hosting account when you access it via SSH, but you also have the power to do many things that can ONLY be accomplished at the terminal. It may be a good idea for you to learn on another machine. I recommend Puppy Linux because it is a free distribution, and it runs very well on older hardware. It is configured so that installation is a breeze and comes with all the tools you need, word processing, spreadsheet, email, etc.

The structure of your account would take volumes to completely describe, but the short version is that you have a home directory that contains directories for your web site, ftp site, mail, and a number of other directories. The directories of primary concern here are your HTTP root in /public_html, and your FTP root in /public_ftp

To control many aspects of how your site behaves you should become familiar with .htaccess. A good tutorial on .htaccess is available here.

You can use .htaccess to control access to various parts of your account using passwords. Since the .htaccess file is a simple ASCII text file you will need a password encryption tool to create the coded password.

Another very useful .htaccess feature is the ability to change your default directory page. You use this to specify what page to load as the default when a browser request does not contain a file reference. In our system you will find the .htaccess file for your web site in /public_html (the root of your site).