Your web server is organized with numerous layers of directories and
subdirectories, just like a series of folders within folders on your computer.
You may already know that the path to a directory is literally the path we’d
take to navigate from the root directory – the first directory in the path – to
the destination directory or the file we’re trying to locate. An absolute path
might look something like this:
/home/mydomain/public_html/cgi-bin/
This would indicate that on my server, to get to the “cgi-bin” directory, we would start in the “home” directory, go into the “mydomain” directory, then into the “public_html” directory, and then into the “cgi-bin” directory.
The web root directory is the first directory in the structure into which we would place files or subdirectories to make them browsable from the web. In this case, “public_html” is my web root. Other common web root directory names are “www”, “inetpub”, “html” etc.
How do you know the name of your web root directory? The only way to know for sure is to ask your host. Alternatively, you can upload an image file to the directory that you think may be the web root, and then try to call it from the browser like this:
http://mydomain.com/imagename.gif
If it works, and you get an image, then you’ve found the web root. If it doesn’t work, then either you’re not in the right directory, or there’s an issue with the image name or file extension. In this case, confirm with your web host the name and location of your web root directory.
To increase the security of your UBB.classic installation, you can place your Member directory above the web root. In our example above, this would mean placing it in the /home or the /mydomain directory, but not in the /public_html or the /cgi-bin directory.
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