Webpage Special Handling

Protecting a Part of Your Site with a password

Sometimes there are parts of your site that you do not wish to share with the whole world. Whether it's some personal information or sensitive business resources you will often feel the need to limit the access to certain pages of your site. You can achieve this by password-protecting a folder of your site, so only visitors that know the correct username and password will be able to browse pages inside the protected folder. When a visitor attempts to access a protected folder or a page inside a protected folder their browser will popup a dialog prompting for a username and a password. This dialog can contain a short description of the content that is protected, for example "My Personal Documents".

To protect a folder in your site click the "Protect" link in the "Pages" group in the main screen of your Control Panel. Your screen should then look like this:

In the "Protected Folders" table you should see a list of the currently protected directories in your hosting account. The folders are displayed relative to the public_html folder of your account. So if you protect the folder behind the http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ URL you will see an entry like www/cgi-bin in the "Protected Folders" table. The "Username(s)" column of the table will show you all usernames (but not the respective passwords) that are allowed to access the folder (after proper authentication). To remove an user simply uncheck the checkbox next to the name and click the "Update" icon in the "Manage" column of the table. The user will no longer be able to access the contents of the folder. To unprotect the folder (allowing all visitors to access the folder without supplying a password) click the "Remove" icon in the "Manage" column.

To protect a folder or add a username to an already protected folder use the "Protect folder" form. Enter a username, the password (twice) and select a folder from the |Folder:" dropdown box. Again the folder is prefixed by the subdomain name so to select the folder behind the http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/ URL you need to select www/cgi-bin from that dropdown box.

Click the "PROTECT" button to protect the folder and add the specified username/password to the list of accounts that are allowed to access the folder.

All changes you make on this screen will take effect immediately.

This feature will not work for subdomains for which FrontPage extensions are enabled. To password-protect a FrontPage subweb please see PENDING:addlink this topic.

Redirecting a part of your site to another site

This useful feature will make it possible to redirect an URL that points to your site to another URL.

Click the "Redirect" link in the "Pages" group in the main screen of your Control Panel.

If you have any redirections set up they will be listed in the "Redirections" table. To delete a redirection click the "Delete" icon next to it. You cannot update a redirection but you can delete and recreate it.

To add a new redirection select the subdomain from the dropdownbox and enter something in the "FROM:" input box. You can use digits, letters, slashesh and the dot "." character. Here are some examples: http://www.yourdomain.com/somefolder, http://www.yourdomain.com/redirect.html, http://www.yourdomain.com/redirect/this.php. The folders or pages you specify here will not actually exist on your site but if a visitor requests them their browser will be pointed to the URL you specify in the "TO:" field.

Click the "OK" button to create the redirection.

All changes you make on this screen will take effect immediately.

This feature will not work for subdomains for which FrontPage extensions are enabled.

Setting Custom Error Pages

Error pages are returned by the webserver whenever it is unable to process an incoming request. The reasons why the request could not be handled may vary, but the most common case is when a page that doesn't exist is required (sometimes referred to as "404 error" after the HTTP protocol response code). So instead of the visitor receiving the default vanilla "Not Found" page you can set your own "Not Found" page that matches the look and feel of your site.

You can set up an error page for 404 (Not Found) errors and a separate error page for all other errors (e.g. 500 - Internal Server Error).

Click the "Error Pages" link in the "Pages" group in the main screen of your Control Panel. You will get to the "Error Pages" screen.

Error pages are set per subdomain (each subdomain can have its own error pages). In the "Error Pages" table you will see a list of all subdomains in your account along with the respective error page settings. If an error page setting is invalid it will appear in red. If the setting points to an existing resource a link to the resource will be given. Click it to see the page that a site visitor would see if the respective error occurs. A special case is when you have disabled the custom error pages functionality. In this case the respective setting will read "default" and the server will not try to find and return an error page from your webroot but will return it's own error message.

To change the error page settings for a subdomain use the "Set New Error Page" form. You need to check the subdomain you wish to modify the settings for (you may select more than one subdomain) and then enter a file name relative to the webroot of the subdomain.

To disable custom error pages (the server will handle errors in a default way) select the respective subdomains and click !!!PENDING