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My Webhosting Company Will Not Allow Me To Create Folders Outside Of Httpdocs


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For security reasons Larry says we should create certain folders outside of the "httpdocs" or main web directory. My web hosting company will not let me. This web hosting company is inexpensive, just about $48.00 a year for domain and all. I think I need to change because of the security concerns. Would you agree? If so is there some hosting companies that you suggest? Or can I set up an old XP computer or Win 98 to be a web server and it be as inexpensive to run? Thanks for your input.

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Hello and welcome to the forums.

 

Recently, I wanted to host a cheap site as well, so I went with iPage, and they have something similar to what you describe going on.

After doing some research though, and I found that you can change which folder is the root of the public domain, which solved my issue.

In the base folder that I can access, I created a new folder called public_html, and I set that as the new public domain root. By doing that, anything outside of that directory became inaccessible from the web, essentially making it my new web root.

A bit of an annoyance, for sure, but it was easy to set up and it wasn't the end of the world if you just want a cheap hosting plan.

 

And just FYI for anyone out there, iPage is certainly cheap, but they're exactly that, cheap. If you don't mind working around some of their annoyances, they do offer decent cheap hosting.

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Ideally certain folders and files should be kept outside of the web directory, but if that's not possible, you can put them in the web directory and protect them from direct access. Less ideal but... Of course, if your host won't let you put things outside the web directory, they may not let you create .htaccess files either!

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