When you have a cPanel shared hosting account for your website then this is the utility which makes you able to provide the email addresses at which you want to receive all the updates and messages from your web hosting server. These provided email addresses works as the main communication point with you and used for informing you any new information about your website and its updates. It is always recommended to use an email address which is not of your website, because it will not face any problem when your website’s emails would stop working.

Have look at the following steps for configuring these preferences.

• In the first text field you should enter the email address which you would like to be used while making contact from web server to you.
• Second text box is provided for entering other optional extra email if first email failed to receive the messages.
• Here you will find 3 check boxes which will decide when server should contact you by sending the email. Following are their descriptions.

1. Your disk quota is almost full :- When your website is close to reach the maximum disk space provided to it then it may cause for failure in modifying the current files and addition of any new files to the website, after receiving this message you need to delete any unwanted old files or upgrade your hosting account with more disk space.
2. Your bandwidth is reaching its limit :- When your website is visited a large number of visitors than normally expected then you face bandwidth issue. Similar to disk space, bandwidth is the resource which is provided with certain limitation for your website, and if it exceeded than the provided limitation then your website will not remain accessible anymore. This type of the problem occurs mostly at month ends and to fix it you need to upgrade your web hosting account with more bandwidth resource.
3. Your email accounts approach the quota :- This notification shows that email address provided by you are about to reach to their maximum limitation of the disk space allocated to it. For resolving this issue you need to delete any unnecessary mails of upgrade your account with more disk space.

• Remember to click ‘Save’ for confirming any changes made by you.

As many of us may know the importance of .htpasswd file while configuring the .htaccess file as it contains all the usernames and passwords of those people who should be grant access to the directories and subdirectories of a particular website.

It is necessary to telnet in to your web hosting server before creating this file.

Go into the directoy and using cd command, you can specify your ‘AuthUserFile’ (/var/www/html/private/)

Type htpasswd -c .htpasswd username for creating the .htpasswd file and adding username to the list which contains users to be authorised for accessing the directory and subdirectories. This program will automatically as you for a password and later on its verification also. Refer to follosing window.

[root@www /root]# cd /var/www/html/private/

[root@www private]# htpasswd -c .htpasswd username

New Password:

Re-type new password:

Adding Password for user username

[root@angles private]#

For adding new user you can use the same command without ‘-c’ switch.(For adding user ‘User1008′ type htpasswd .htpasswd User1008. )

For deleting user you should open .htpasswd file and by using any unix editor you can use dlete the row related with that particular user to be removed.

username:User1008

User1008:dljksjfh.

admin:gjhgdfjsga

Following post is aimed to provide security to web directories through password protection, which are on Unix or Linux web hosting server. You can restrict the access of any particular directory, following process will create a username and password entry whenever someone would try to access the protected directory. This utility is totally free of cost and just take about 15 minutes for its configuration.

Configuration of .htaccess file.

At the start you need to create .htaccess authentication file which is important for granting access and other rights about the files in the directory. This short tutorial is about restriction unauthorised person to view (GET) and upload (POST) files in the directory.

Approach your favorite editor i.e. Notepad or you can also go for telnet on your web hosting server and choose Unix editor (vi) creat a text file using the following code and make sure to to keep the path (/var/www/html/private/) of the directory to the exact location where you want to store the usernames and passwords which are to be authenticated. In following code ‘Protected Directory’ is used as example name of your authentication window.

AuthUserFile /var/www/html/private/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “My Private Directory”
AuthType Basic

<Limit GET POST>
require valid-user
</Limit>

Save the file created with the above code with the name ‘.htaccess’. Place this .htaccess file in to the directory which you want to be protected. If the file is created on a local system then you can use ftp to get the file into the directory and if you have used a Unix editor (vi) then you can use ‘mv’ command to move the file to your desired directory.

Important Note :- exact path of .htpasswd file is very important, if you are confused about it then you should contact your web hosting provider. When a .htaccess file is placed in to a particular directory then it also restrict access to the subdirectories placed in that particular directory.