The .htaccess file is a way to make a change to the configurations of your hosting account for each directory.  For example, once you put a .htacess file in your public_html folder, on a Linux based hosting account, it will set the rules for that folder and all the folders created in it.

Here is everything you need to know…

Step 1 – Open up a text editor (such as Notepad or cPanel’s File Manager) and add in the lines you need and save the file.

Step 2 – Using the cPanel’s File Manager or your FTP client you will need to upload the file to the location you need it. This is usually inside of your public_html folder.

Step 3 – Rename the file to .htaccess, and save. It should be noted that .htaccess is the file extension. It is not filename.htaccess or yourpage.htaccess, it is just named .htaccess.

Truth be told, you really don’t need to know what the .haccess file is, as long as you can find the right snipits of code or “recipes” in it to get the job done.  At least now you know how to create it… and knowing is half the battle.

It is no secret that bad things sometimes happen to good web sites.  When this happens on your web hosting account, it is often shown as a HTTP error.  Each problem that could happen with a web site, has an HTTP error code associated with it, which is suppose to tell you what the problem is.  The problem is that they are not really translated into something the general public can understand.

Have no fear though, because I am going to give you five of the most common HTTP errors and what they really mean.

500 Internal Server Error

This is your general purpose error message from the server say, “Hey… none of the other messages really fit here, so we are just going to tell you something screwed up, please try again!”.  It could be coming up because the site in question is overloaded with requests, or it could be a system admin trip over the power cord.

404  Not Found

Hey, that isn’t there – so go away is the general message you should get when you see a 404 error code.  Probably the most famous error code, if they were ranked by popularity.  The requested resource could not be found but may be available again in the future… if your lucky.

403  Forbidden

The 403 error is telling you, that you really are not suppose to be there.  It is kind of like the 401 error code, except this time you didn’t even have the chance to try to log in to view the files.  You are just not allowed, go away, you are not suppose to be trying to look at that.

400  Bad Request

When you get this HTTP error, it usually means your browser access the page in the wrong way, or somehow your request to view the page was corrupted along the way.  The signal got lost, confused and started looking for a magic leprechaun, and totally forget about your request to view that site.

401  Unauthorized

With this web page error code, you see it when you put in the wrong user name or password when trying to log into a protected area.  For example, you were trying to log into that ex-girlfriends photo collection to see if she had deleted all the pictures of you.  Since you got the 401 error, you’ll never be able to see she simple edited your face out and replaced it with a headshot of Bill, that vampire guy, from True Blood.

Have another HTTP error that has you stumped?  Leave a comment, and perhaps we will do a round two of these geek to regular speak HTTP error translations.

Your first step would be to open up a text editor (such as Notepad or cPanel’s File Manager) and add in the lines you need and save the file. Next, using the cPanel’s File Manager or your FTP client you will need to upload the file to the location you need it. This is usually inside of your public_html folder.

This link includes the php.ini directives you can set to configure your PHP setup.

Now, rename the file to php.ini, and save. To protect the php.ini file, you can add these lines to your .htaccess file:

<Files .php.ini>

order allow,deny

deny from all

</Files>

This way, it can not be displayed when somebody types in the file path into their browser. With some web hosts, in the .htaccess file, you will need to add the following line:

suPHP_ConfigPath /home/username/public_html

Replace username with your actual cPanel user name. This will tell your account where your php.ini file exists.  Other web hosts might have other rules when it comes to setting up the php.ini file for their hosting environment, so you might check with them to see what they recommend.

From industry news, to domain stories.  From big business to the little guy.  Gawkwire is already providing news from all corners of the hosting world and doing well at it.  Here is how Robert Lang, Gawkwire managing editor describes this new hosting resource:

“We designed Gawkwire to build on the strengths of other hosting news portals and magazines. Unlike many sites, our content is updated continuously, not once a day or even once a week. We take it a step further, by creating a dialogue with our readers that enhances the overall experience of our site.  And we don’t stop with just news articles. Gawkwire’s rich content covers a wide spectrum, with everything from video blog posts to executive interviews.”

I am very excited to see the launch of something new out there in the hosting news bubble.  Too long has the field grown more than a little stagnite, and the hopes for Gawkwire is to add a little ‘bit more spice, interest and information to the world of Internet and hosting news.

Some people do it because they heard a friend to tell a friend that advice. Others do it to sell ten page eBooks on the topic that cost the end user $65 a pop. I am going to help you get something done though by sharing the answers to some of these frequently asked (and answered wrong) questions.

Will having a dedicated IP address help you with search engine optimization?

The simple answer is no. It is a myth that Google or any other search engine will penalize you for hosting on a server that shares an IP address or for not having a dedicated IP address.

Is having static addresses better than having dynamic ones?

To explain, a dynamic address would be one used by a service like WordPress does by default, giving you something like article.php?post=543 after your domain in the addresses bar or something to that effect. When you see a static address, it looks much more like the one you see at WebHostingShow.com when you click on a story to read where it has in the address something like /archive/story-about-hosting.php.

In most cases, search engines would search either one but I would tend to go with the static addresses if you can, because it is more user friendly to the visitor and for keyword reasons. Now having good related keywords in the address, this is a search engine optimization tip that is slowly fading away but is still relevant right now.

For search engine optimization, what is the best way to change a domain name address?

You want to use what is referred to in the business as a 301 redirect. There are a number of ways to get this done so by searching Google for 301 redirect you are bound to find a lot of methods. Easiest would be to put this in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage.htm

A 301 redirect is telling the world that your page has moved permanently, that is what the 301 code stands for.

You should get away from your previous hosting company as quickly as you can?

This is not always the case. You may want to wait till you see your search engine spiders and bots crawling over your new content before you go back to your old web host and cancel your web site’s old hosting account. Not doing so could lead the search engine spiders to a dead end a few times (during domain name propagation) and it might cause your web site to get dropped from the search engine rankings. This is because from the spider’s point of view, you no longer exist.

Have any other SEO myths that need to be de-bunked? Drop me a line or a comment.

Now this might be a little different depending on the cPanel skin you are using, but it should work generally for any and all.

Step one would be to login to cPanel and go to your mail settings (usually you can just click on the “Mail” icon to get you there. Next you will want to go to:

Add/Remove/Manage Accounts

This is your Mail Account Maintenance page. Here you can see all the e-mail accounts you have created. If you have not yet created one go to “Add Account” to do so. Here you can fill in the name you want to use (the thing that going before @yourdomain.com), your password and the Quota. By default the setting should be 10 Meg. This stands for 10 Megabytes.

Now it is time for some math. To make things easy, let us say you wanted to bump your e-mail quota to 5 GB of storage.

1 gigabytes = 1,024 megabytes

Using Google, you can do the conversions quicker. Just type into Google “5 GB to MB“. The answer you need to type into cPanel’s quota box would be “5120” which is 5,120 MB. If all goes well you should see the message:

The e-mail account (your e-mail address) with the login (your login) and password (your password) with a quota of 5120 Megabytes was successfully created.

To change that later on, just go back into your Mail Account Maintenance screen, find your e-mail account and click on “Quota”. See, now you know you don’t need a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail in your life to have a larger online inbox.

You can get this done in four easy steps:

Step 1: Find a WordPress template that you like, and remove the blog related content in the sidebar (or wherever else it is posted). If you can create a WordPress layout by hand you might be better off.

Step 2: Login to the WordPress administration interface and go to Options, then Reading. On that page you can set your front page to be a static web page instead of the default blog list that you get.

Step 3: Mange all the pages on your site, by going to Write and then Write Page inside of the WordPress administration interface. To edit your creations later you can go to Manage and then Pages. From there you should get a full list of the pages you have created.

Step 4: You might have to go in and edit your template files ago to make sure you are linking to all the pages you have created. Since most sites done this way will be pretty small, you can get away with making these links by hand. I am sure there are automatic ways of doing it too using the list pages tag from WordPress. I would not bother though unless your just looking for something to tweak later down the road.

Personally this interested me at first because I wanted to know if it could be done. Now that I have done it with my own personal web site, I have found it to be an easy way to make edits and changes to my little biography on the Web. Another neat perk about doing this is you can work in WordPress plugins into the mix and get some awesome dynamic interaction for a static web site.

Traveling from web host to web host looking for news and information I see a lot of people who don’t do much as far as support pages go. On the other side of the scale, you also have hosts that push out so many support pages that there is no way they’ll be able to keep them all up to date.

How Do You Find the Problem?

Check out your web site statistical information (one of my favorites to use is Google Analytics) and with your support pages see where you are getting the most hits. Now navigate yourself to a few of these pages and see if there is anything that could be improved on or updated.

Another thing you could do while support might not be so busy is to surf around your support pages to make sure there are no broken links. Now these are sometimes harder to find – but the worst thing you can do to a customer looking for help is lead them to a dead end.

Is There an Easier Way?

Now with both of those suggestions out of the way, we can make your job easier. How can you do that? Well, time to include a link leading to a contact form at the bottom of each of your support pages saying something to the effect of:

“Dead link? Out of date? Send us an e-mail and let us know!”

This will give your customer, clients and visitors a way of contacting you to let you know you have some work to do. Getting even a little more fancy, you could setup a special address for this and have it forward over right to your designers or a specific part of your support team so they can get these fixed as soon as they come in.

Web design is a mysterious art that some can do and not many have mastered. When it comes to a Web hosting web site – people expect to see certain things as customers and if your lacking in these areas it could hurt you down the road. Sure fancy flash and really hot pictures of server racks are nice, but they won’t win you any clients.

Keep it Simple

Some web hosts out there like to fit as much content, flashing banners and overdone graphics on the front page as they can fit. This is not the best way to go. Personally, I like it when web hosts keep it simple.

Give me the Basics

I do not need to know every single detail about every single plan. Here is a basic forumula for what I want to see on your front page:

• Company Name
• Little Information About You
• Plans (Disk Space/Bandwidth at Least)
• Links to Other Pages for More Information

Finding the right balance between hype and helpful details is hard to do. Once you have done it though, I promise your current and potential clients will really thank you.

Sell Yourself in a Few Words

If you doing something great it shouldn’t take that long to convey the message to others. As much as having paragraph after paragraph about how good plan number one is or how great you are in general might look, keeping things short and sweet will go a long way.

Here are a few examples of web hosts who do follow all my rules:

Hostgator.com | Lunarpages.com | HostMonster.com | StartLogic.com

It might take a while before you find the layout or design that is just right for your particular business. The basics you need to remember though are to make sure you are different from the rest, touch base with everything that you cover and don’t be afraid to try something a little different.

Doing a search on your own domain name you can find out:

• How many other sites are hosted on the same server.
• The server’s status on the black lists out there.
• The type of server your web site is hosted on.

Another good place to find stats on a specific web host is webhosting.info. Just type in the domain name of your web host into the search box – and then select “Web Hosts” in the radio box selection and hit the “Go” button.

You might want to keep in mind that if they are not large enough they might not get picked up by the rankings. Also if they are using several different domains for their servers you might need to do this lookup several different times with each domain and add the final numbers together.

Last but not least – there is always doing a few searches. Personally I would search for: “Insert Company Name Here” sucks.

Now you might not get the best review this way because these are often people that are just mad at the web hosting question and want to spew something out about them. It is always good to take the good in with the bad though. Google aside – you may also want to search hosting forums like WebHostingTalk.com to also get an idea of what others have had to say about your web host.