Web Hosting

In the hopefully unlikely event that you are unable to access your website, the first thing you should check is your own network connection. You may find that you cannot access any websites. If that is not the case, there is a network problem between your computer and your server. …

Question: How do I configure my website to automatically go to a page other than index.***? Answer: If your web hosting provider is hosting your site using Apache HTTP server, you can accomplish this very easily with an htaccess file. If you do not already have one, create a plain …

Winter is quickly approaching, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some spring cleaning on your shared hosting account or dedicated server. After just a few months of use, your main directory can be full of all sorts of garbage needlessly taking up space, including: Unused CMS or script installs …

Question: What are user agents, and why are they important? Answer: In the context of web servers, a user agent is any network host that connects to the server. Most frequently, it is used to refer to web browsers, but it can be other things as well. Anytime a search …

FXP stands for File eXchange Protocol, and is a method of data transfer that allows a user to transfer files from one server to another, without going through the user’s computer or network. The Good: In essence it is the closest thing to server-to-server transfer without direct access and the …

There are a lot of free FTP clients out there for the Mac, but my favorite is Cyberduck. Boasting a great user-interface and support for a wide variety of protocols, it’s a good alternative to the popular but expensive Transmit 3. The open source software has a number of features …

Many content management systems (CMS) like Joomla recommend users disable a PHP security feature called “register_globals”. The default setting for it is controlled by your server administrator. If you have a shared hosting account, however, you still might be able to override the default server settings. To accomplish this, create …

Question: How do I password protect a directory on my website? Answer: Many web hosting control panels offer a “password protect” feature for your directories. If not, there is a moderately easy way to do it with an Apache .htaccess file. First, create an .htaccess file that looks like this: …

Question: I want to troubleshoot a PHP script. How do I run it from the command line? Answer: In order to successfully run PHP from the command line, you will need to install PHP as CGI. In many Linux distributions, there will be a package in the repository that allows …

When something goes wrong with a web host or server, customers are always anxious for their support queries to be answered. While good support takes time, how long should a user have to wait? The idea of “good support” varies greatly from host to host. Some respond to tickets in …