Learning More About Hosting: Setting Up a Document Root

Posted by Alicia at 4/1/2008 5:22 PM and is filed under Shared Hosting,Learning More About Hosting,Hosting

Many of you have asked if you can change the default document root for your hosting account or what you see as your 'home' directory. Let's say you would like to setup a 'Wordpress' directory to be the default so this way users don't have any redirects when simply hitting the domain. For domain aliases added to a hosting account you are able to setup a directory for the document root of that alias.
For example, you own domain "abc.com". You would like to use the directory 'Wordpress' as the document root when people visit "http://www.abc.com". The steps to achieve this are:
1) Use the 'Hosting Control Center' to modify the domain of your hosting account to something other than "abc.com". It has to be unique in our system, but usually something like "this-is-my-fake-abc-dot-com.com" will be unique in the system.
2) After the domain change completes, use the 'Hosting Control Center' to add a domain to your account. Select your "abc.com" domain from the drop-down and be sure to specify 'Wordpress' as the home directory. This will add your previous domain as an 'alias' to your account.
3) Once the 'alias' completes setup (usually less than 30 minutes), your domain will be working and have its document root as your 'Wordpress' directory.
Please realize this is a definitely considered a workaround and we know it's not the ideal solution. It's also important to know that your site may experience downtime depending on the timing of the DNS updates.
Use this article for detailed instructions. Setting up a Non-Web Accessible Root Folder
Note: This procedure applies to Deluxe and Premium hosting accounts only.

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Managing Your Hosting Account Domains

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Last Updated: October 9, 2008 3:53 PM

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Here's the lowdown: To manage your hosting account domains, go to the Domain Management page in the Settings section of the Hosting Control Center.

In addition to your primary hosted domain, you can host other domains on a single Windows or Linux hosting account. Deluxe and Premium hosting plans allow you to point additional domains to any content subdirectory. Domains added to Economy hosting plans can point to the hosting root directory, only.

Changing your primary hosted domain is possible only on paid accounts that do not have an SSL certificate.

If the new domain name is in the same shopper account as your hosting, changing the domain takes between two and twenty four hours, during which time your Web site is accessible through both the old and new domain.

If the new domain name is not in the same shopper account as your hosting, you must manually update your domain's A record so that it points to your Web site's IP address. If the new domain name has subdomains, you must manually create an A record for each subdomain.