You can use your account management control panel to protect one or more Web pages with a password. If you do this, anyone trying to view those pages will be asked to enter a user name and password.
A password actually protects all the Web pages in a certain directory (folder). For example, you might put all your private Web pages in a directory named private, then protect that directory. If you do that, anyone visiting http://www.example.com/private/anything would be asked to provide a password.
You can have more than one private directory, with different password lists for each directory if you wish. When you protect a directory, all the files in that directory (and in every subdirectory of that directory) are protected. You can't protect some files in a directory and not others.
To password protect a directory:
You can add different user names and passwords to the list.
Once you have created the password list, you can use that list to protect any top-level directory of your Web site. (To add a new directory to the "Protected Directories" section of the control panel page, just create that directory in your Web design or FTP program first. Make sure that the directory name you use contains only letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens.)
If you want to use different password lists to protect different directories, you can use Add New List again to create as many additional password lists as you wish.
To keep things simple, our control panel only shows folders at the first level of your Web site. The Apache Web server software we use does allow you to password protect other directories, but the way it actually works can be quite confusing if you apply passwords to two different levels of your Web site.
Unless you're extremely familiar with how Apache password protection works, we recommend only protecting directories at the top level. This makes sure you don't accidentally create conflicting password rules at different levels.
However, if you're an advanced user and you need to protect other directories (or even the whole Web site), you can do that quite easily. The password protection for a directory is controlled by putting special lines of text in a file named .htaccess. In fact, all our control panel does is create those files for you.
If you're an expert with ".htaccess" files, you can create the ".htaccess" files yourself manually (they work just as they do on any other Apache server).
Or you can use our control panel as a shortcut to do 90% of the work: simply password protect any first-level directory using our control panel (creating the necessary ".htaccess" file), then use your FTP program to move the ".htaccess" file to any other directory (or even to the top level of your Web site), and that directory (or the whole Web site) will then be protected.
If you have trouble doing this, we'll be glad to help. Just create a temporary new directory at the top level of your Web site, then contact us and tell us the temporary directory name and the real directory location you want to protect. We'll move the file for you.