Tsoft Internet Services Web Hosting Information

This page lists some information you'll need to manage your web site at Tsoft. There are three sets of information you may need depending on your account and options. They are:

PPP-only access (PPP-only, Personal ISDN, Charter ISDN w/out Shell option)
Any account with a BSD Shell account option (including Shell-only)
A BSD Shell account with Virtual Domain Hosting

The sections below detail how to upload and manage web pages, how to use CGI scripts, where log files are, etc. If you have any other questions, please let us know.

Web pages with your PPP-only access account (no Shell account)

This info applies only when you do NOT have a BSD Shell account as part of your account. If you have a Shell account, please see this section.

All account maintenance is performed by ftp to www.tsoft.com. With an FTP client, such as WS_FTP or CuteFTP on a Windows machine, or Fetch on a Mac, you login to www.tsoft.com using your login name and password (the same login and password as your email account).

Once you've logged into the FTP server as your login you'll be able to access your web pages under the directory /users/username where username is your email name (the part before @tsoft.com, same as your login). You'll be placed into this directory by default when you login. You may upload and download files with the PUT and GET commands, change file modes with the SITE CHMOD command, make new directories with MKDIR, delete files and directories with DELE, etc.

The base URL to your personal web site is http://www.tsoft.com/~username which cooresponds to the directory above. The file index.html in any directory will be displayed if a URL to that directory is specified, otherwise a list of the directory contents will be built by the web server.

Unless otherwise arranged, you have 5MB of disk space for web pages. You cannot use your own CGI scripts (see the Shell account option to do this). You also don't have direct access to log files at this time.

Web pages with your Shell account option

Anytime you have a Shell account with Tsoft, whether it's an option to a PPP or ISDN account, or a Shell-only account, your web pages are stored in your Shell home directory in the public_html directory as the root of your web site (~/public_html).

In order to be accessable on your website, files must be readable by the world... generally recommended permissions is 644 which will be read/write by you, and readonly by everyone else. Directories should usually be mode 755, which is read/write/execute by you, and read/execute by everyone else. Also, your home directory must allow access by others so they can get to the public_html directory, but not necessarily directory listing access... the mode should be defaulted to 711 by us when your account was created, which allows full access to you, but only lets other users access a file if (a) they already know the file's name (ls won't show them), and (b) they have access to the file itself.

CGI notes

With your shell account, you can use your own CGI scripts with your account. The scripts go in the ~/public_html/cgi-bin directory and coorespond to the base URL of http://www.tsoft.com/~username/cgi-bin. When the scripts are executed, they'll be run under your own user ID and have the same access to files as if you were logged into your accuont.

Before each script execution, the web server does some security checks on your scripts to help cut down on the chance for accidental security problems you may leave into your account, but this can also result in strange errors. If you get errors, particularly web server misconfig errors, when trying to invoke one of your scripts, you should check the /var/log/httpd/cgi.log file for helpful hints as to why the execution failed. Some (but not all) of the requirements are that the script file be owned by you, not writeable by anyone else, and that the directory the script is in is also owned by you and not writeable by anyone else.

Please keep in mind that errors in programming CGI scripts can sometimes let crackers break into your account, so be very careful which third-party scripts you use and that you consider security implications when writing scripts.

Web pages in your Virtual Domain Hosting account

First off, when you have a virtual domain hosted with Tsoft you'll usually also have a BSD shell account with us... the section above applies to your ~/public_html directory, and that remains a separate web URL accessable as http://www.tsoft.com/~username/.

For your virtual domain, let's use virtual.dom in our example, the root of your web site is instead in a directory called /home/web/virtual.dom/docs, and the web site's CGI scripts go in /home/web/virtual.dom/cgi-bin (note that this is not a subdirectory of the document directory as it is with your ~public_html/cgi-bin directory. The file index.html in your docs directory cooresponds to the URL http://www.virtual.dom/

The CGI notes mentioned in the Shell web hosting section above also apply to virtual web sites, with the different cgi-bin directory. Finally, you can find various log files for your virtual web site in /var/log/httpd/virtual.dom*.

You can reach Tsoft support by email at support@tsoft.com, or phone at +1 510 843 8763.