What the hell is web site hosting, anyway?

I answer this question quite often, also, so hopefully this article will help to clarify what website hosting is. Website hosting (aka hosting) is much different than a domain name, though they’re very closely related.

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Find out which version of Apache is running on unix/*nix systems

To find out which version of Apache you’re running on a *nix system, you can run the following command. This will only work if you have permission to run the script in the first place, so you should probably login as root or use sudo, if you can. If this isn’t possible, then you should probably just contact your hosting provider or just look around in your hosting control panel.

steve$ httpd -v
# or use this  
steve$ httpd -V

Posted in: servers | Tags: ,

Mod_Rewrite PHP No Input File Specified

So I launched a site. It was using nice clean rewrites on my dev server (partly local, partly fedora 8). After launching to a godaddy server, i was getting the error: No input file specified.. I knew my redirects/rewrites should have been working.

So, I did some searching, and after (yes, a gruelling 8 minutes), I was beginning to worry that I would have no answer, and would have to construct something very duck-tapish. I really didn’t want to have to do this, because the site needed to be online by 8am. It was currently 1am, and I haven’t slept in a good 20 or so.

So, I finally came across a post on pligg forums. This actually did it. Of course, this fix assumed that my rewrites were working ok, which they were.

Posted in: servers | Tags: , ,

upload_max_filesize PHP/Apache upload of large files

You may encounter a constraint when trying to upload files to your website. You may exceed the allowed upload size. You can fix this by modifying your .htaccess file to allow PHP to handle files larger than the default 2 MB.

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Posted in: code | Tags: ,

Simple Password Protection for your website page

Quite often you’ll need to password protect a web page. This can easily become difficult if you need to authenticate users that belong to groups or roles. But for just a quick password protected page, you can use .htaccess and Apache’s authentication.

You’ll need ssh or ftp access, and your server must be configured to allow .htaccess overrides.

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Posted in: servers | Tags: , ,

PHP displays a blank white page

Often times during development, a PHP page will suddenly display a blank white page. For those of you who don’t know this, it can be very helpful to toggle error display to allow you to view why PHP is showing nothing. Read more…

Posted in: misc | Tags: , , ,