Knowledgebase

Changing Hosting Settings

Panel allows you to manage a number of various hosting settings:

• Basic settings, like a domain name or hosting type.
• Security settings. To secure connections to your site with SSL certificates, you should activate the SSL support first.
• Scripting settings. You can specify what scripting languages your site will support. Learn more in the section Web Scripting Settings. Moreover, Panel supports custom per-site (per-subdomain) configuration for the PHP and ASP.NET languages. To learn more about the adjustable settings, see the sections PHP Settings and ASP.NET Settings (Windows).

If you want to review the hosting settings or select the hosting features and scripting languages that should be supported on your site:

1. If you are subscribed to several hosting packages and have access to several webspaces associated with your account, in the Subscription menu at the top of the screen, select the webspace where the website is hosted.
2. Click the Websites & Domains tab.
3. In the list of websites at the bottom of the screen, click the website address.
4. Review or change the following hosting settings and options:
   • Hosting type. The type of hosting configuration selected by default is website hosting, which means that the website is hosted on this server. You can also choose to redirect visitors to another website (this setup is also known as web forwarding); switch off web hosting service if you need to host only mailboxes and mailing lists under that domain; or suspend the website and all mailboxes and mailing lists hosted under the website's domain name.
     • If you want to redirect visitors to another site, click the Change link, select the Forwarding option, type the destination site address, select the forwarding scheme, and click OK.
     • If you want to switch off web service and use only e-mail services under that domain, click the Change link, select the No web hosting option, and click OK.
     • If you want to suspend the website and all services associated with it, including mail, click the Suspend link. When you need to bring that domain or website back online, return to the Websites & Domains tab > domain name, and click the Activate link.
   • Document root. The location of the directory where all files and subdirectories of the site will be kept. You can use the default directory called httpdocs or specify another directory.
   • Enable SSL support. Secure Sockets Layer encryption is generally used for protecting transfer of sensitive data during online transactions on e-commerce websites that run on dedicated IP addresses. SSL certificates that participate in the encryption process are usually applied to a single domain name on a single IP address, therefore, each site that needs SSL protection must be hosted on a dedicated IP address. An exception to this is subdomains, which you can protect with a wildcard certificate. Installing an SSL certificate on a web server that hosts several websites with different domain names on a single IP address is technically possible, however, it is not recommended: the encryption will be provided, but users will get warning messages on attempt to connect to the secure site. To allow SSL encryption for the website, select the Enable SSL support checkbox.
   • Scripting languages. Specify which of the following programming and scripting languages should be supported by the web server: Active Server Pages (ASP), Microsoft ASP.NET, Server Side Includes (SSI), PHP hypertext preprocessor (PHP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Fast Common Gateway Interface (FastCGI), Perl and Python. By default, PHP is configured to operate in safe mode, with functional restrictions that strengthen hosting security. To learn more about PHP safe mode, refer to http://php.net/features.safe-mode.
   • Microsoft FrontPage settings. Microsoft FrontPage is a popular website authoring tool. To enable content creation and publishing through Microsoft FrontPage, select the options Microsoft FrontPage support, Microsoft FrontPage over SSL support, and Remote FrontPage authoring allowed.
   • Web statistics. Select the web statistics software that you want to use for viewing graphical reports and charts on website visitors. Also, select the corresponding checkbox if you want to be able to access the statistical reports by visiting the password-protected directory http://your-website/plesk-stat/webstat.
   • Custom error documents. When visitors coming to a site request pages that the web server cannot find, the web server generates and displays a standard HTML page with an error message. If you want to create your own error pages and use them on the web server, select the Custom error documents checkbox.
   • Additional write and modify permissions (available only for Windows hosting). This option is required if web applications on the site will be using a file-based database (like Jet) located in the root of httpdocs directory. Note that selecting this option will seriously compromise the website security.
5. When finished with viewing or changing hosting settings, click OK.

The Location of the cgi-bin Directory

When creating a domain, you may see different possible locations of your cgi-bin directory (the CGI support checkbox). Let us discuss them on samples.

A typical domain files organization in Panel 11 is as follows:

• /var/www/vhosts/webspace1.com/example1.com/
• /var/www/vhosts/webspace1.com/example2.com/
• /var/www/vhosts/webspace1.com/example3.com/

Here example domains are created under the webspace1.com webspace.

If you specify that the cgi-bin directory for a domain example3.com is the root directory of webspace, its absolute path will be

/var/www/vhosts/webspace1.com/cgi-bin/

If you specify that the directory is the document root of this domain, its absolute path will be

/var/www/vhosts/webspace1.com/example3.com/cgi-bin/

If you specify old-style root of this domain (this option is available only after upgrading Panel from previous versions), the absolute path will be

/var/www/vhosts/domain3.com/cgi-bin

This option provides the compatibility with the obsoleted organization of domain files on the file system.