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Unix Hosting Developer Information |
Our new shared UNIX Hosting platform uses a system of redundant Linux Servers in a clustered environment that prevents any single point of failure.
See details about accepted file names, software and more here: creating your site.
Our server environment uses Apache Web Server. For more information about Apache, please refer to Apache's web site http://www.apache.org/. For more detail on our specific Apache environment, see the PHP info page at:
http://demo.easystreet.com/phpinfo.php
Please contact one of our sales staff for assistance setting up a secure connection (SSL) for your web site. Also see details about SSL on our servers.
Our web site hosting service is implemented using name-based virtual hosts. Name-based virtual hosts distinguish virtual domains by web site address, instead of by an IP address. This means that instead of being recognized as a number -- 192.168.1.79, for example -- your site is only recognized by its web site address, e.g. www.domain.com.
Using name-based hosts allows EasyStreet to maintain a more efficient web server environment. However, it has some implications you should be aware of:
More information on name-based virtual hosts is available on the Apache Web site.
Be advised that secure Web sites are IP-based by definition because the SSL protocol on which secure HTTP connections rely does not support name-based addressing.
| Development Tool | Location |
|---|---|
| CGI | .cgi and .pl files should be placed in the cgi-bin directory to be executed as CGI programs. If you need to override this to allow execution in your public directory, you can do so with an .htaccess file. |
| FrontPage not supported | FrontPage Extensions are not supported in our Unix environment. We have Windows Hosting in which Front Page is supported. |
| Perl 5 | /usr/bin/perl .cgi and .pl files should be placed in the /cgi-bin directory. If you need to override this to allow execution in your public directory, you can do so with an .htaccess file. |
| PHP 4 | We generally have installed the latest stable version of PHP. See exact details in our PHP Info file: http://demo.easystreet.com/phpinfo.php |
| Sendmail | /usr/sbin/sendmail |
Some programs requre an absolute path from the server root to to a file in your web space; this is a calculated value that looks like the example below.
/services/webpages/[first_letter_of_domain]/[second_letter_of_domain]/[yourdomain.com]/[pathtofile]
With the domain hahnmeyerphotos.org, for example, the absolute path to the index.html page that is in the public folder would be:
/services/webpages/h/a/hahnmeyerphotos.org/public/index.html
You would adjust everything after /services/webpages/ based on your domain and actual location of your file.
A dynamic configuration file is an web server configuration file
that allows certain aspects of the server's configuration to be modified when
people view your web site in their browser. Dynamic configuration files are named
.htaccess and may appear in any subdirectory of the web
directory. These files can be used to restrict access to portions of your
web site and to add MIME type mappings. You can also control which
Server-Parsed HTML options are used on your site via the .htaccess
file.
The Apache HTTP server documentation at http://www.apache.org/docs/ discusses Apache's configuration directives and indicates whether or not the directive can appear in a dynamic configuration file.
For more information check out our page on Dynamic Configuration Files and Adding password protection to your web site.
Detailed information about CGI scripts can be found in our CGI reference.
The web server is preconfigured with a large set of MIME type mappings. MIME, or Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, is an extension of Internet email that provides the ability to transfer non-text data, such as graphics, audio and fax. Web servers use MIME types to tell Internet browsers what type of content they are receiving.
Most of our web hosting customers find the preconfigured MIME type mappings adequate for their purposes. If necessary, you may specify additional MIME types in your Dynamic Configuration File.
If you are using perl, please read the CGI Information above, since much of the information for CGI is the same as it is for perl.
Perl files must have a .pl file extension and correctly
reference the path to Perl on the Server /usr/bin/perl.
If you think that there is a problem with the
perl interpreters on our servers, try uploading (as ascii) our
Perl Test File to your server's cgi-bin. Then
change its permissions to 755. To view that page in
your web browser go to: http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/perl_test.pl
and you should see
"Hello World".
To see Perl version number, environment variables and installed Perl Modules, visit our copy of the PerlDigger CGI script. Be patient, it takes more than 10 seconds to complete the list of installed modules.
If a module you need is not installed, you can try installing it locally in your own hosting space.
To do this, you would upload the script that is using the module to the cgi-bin. Then upload the Perl module to the cgi-bin. If you put the module itself in the cgi-bin. In the script that needs the module, you can call it by using the use command. Example:
use perlmodule;
If you have multiple modules and you want to put them in their own directory then you have to use the use lib command. Example:
use lib '/directory name/';
use perlmodule;
PHP is a cross-platform, server side scripting language that allows you to build interactivity and database connectivity into regular HTML. We have installed the latest stable version of PHP. To see more about our development environment including exact current version, see our PHP Info script:
http://demo.easystreet.com/phpinfo.php
Problem: Why won't your server show me my php script errors?
Answer: our server has php error reporting turned off by default, but you can override this with a custom .htaccess file for your site.
Problem: My database inserts are escaped too many times. How can I turn off the extra backslashes on database inserts?
Answer: our server has magic_quotes_gpc turned on by default, but you can override this with a custom .htaccess file for your site.
Server-parsed HTML, also known as server-side includes, is a feature of our web servers that allows "behind the scenes" actions to be performed on an HTML document before it is displayed to the user.
A common example of a server-side include is inserting a section of text into an HTML document just before it is displayed to the user. The inserted text is not part of the original HTML document; it is added when the HTTP server processes the server-parsed HTML file. Web site developers often use this technique to allow several pages to share a common piece of text without having to maintain that text in multiple places.
More details can be found in the Server Side Includes page.
mod_rewrite is fully supported, but there are some configuration issues you
need to take into account. Normally you would use a relative path in your
RewriteRule such as this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
This is highly useful when working with clean URLs.
There are some restrictions on mod_rewrite that require the full URL path to be
used. This is due to security implementations on our Apache installation involving
the shared nature of our platforms.
So you would write that directive as:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /FOLDERNAME/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
Users with Value and higher web hosting accounts can have access to a shared MySQL server. see our MySQL support documentation for further details.
EasyStreet Support can help you with adding the two database that your account allows and giving you the settings to use in your Perl, CGI or PHP script to connect to the database. We cannot help troubleshoot database issues beyond that. For more complex issues, we recommend you get a developer familiar with MySQL.
Customers on our servers have full access to the raw access log file. Your domain's log file updates within a few minutes of someone browsing your site.
Every web site is unique, and every web site owner is interested in different information about their web site traffic. For this reason, EasyStreet encourages each web site owner to perform their own log analysis.
Your WebSiteOS control panel comes with Webalizer log analysis, but it is not enabled by default.
Some customers also find WebTrends log analysis products useful. For users with multiple web sites, WebTrends offers the WebTrends Log Analyzer client-side software. This product downloads the web server log files and performs the analysis locally on your computer.
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