Please note that these instructions are only applicable to VN Business Webhosting customers
(i.e. www.yourdomain.com), and not for personal accounts (i.e. www.users.voicenet.com/~username).
Please Note: Unfortunately, due to the nature of the platform, if your website is hosted on a Windows Web Server, you will need to either know how to write (or download and configure) the proper ASP, JavaScript, Perl, etc. code in order to enable password protected directory for your website. Alternatively, you can request that Voicenet set up simple password protection for you by contacting Voicenet`s Technical Support Department. Please continue on reading this document if your Voicenet website is resides on a UNIX or Linux server.
If you`ve made it this far, it means that your Web Server supports something called "htaccess." While htaccess can be used for a great many things, it`s most popular use is for password protecting portions of websites. All htaccess really is, is set of two files the tell the server who you want to let into what portions of your site. These files are called ".htaccess" and ".htpasswd" (please be sure to note the "." preceding each filename).
The ".htaccess" file must be present in each directory that you wish to be password protected and contains a list of instructions to the webserver that look like this:
For reasons including security and convenience, the .htaccess file looks for a separate file called ".htpasswd" which contains your list of usernames and encrypted passwords. This way, if you so desire, you can use the same list of usernames and passwords for protecting different directories within your website, each directory containing it's own .htaccess file which consults a single ".htpasswd" file. Entries in the ".htpasswd" file look like the following:
