Developer tools questions

.htaccess is a configuration file that changes how the web server handles requests for the folder it sits in — redirects, custom error pages, access rules and caching headers. It takes effect immediately, with no restart needed.

Yes. SSH is available on port 26628 using your hosting username and password — the same port as SFTP. It is a user-level shell, so there is no root access.

Yes — several versions of both Node.js and Python are available, set up from DirectAdmin. They run with the resources of a shared hosting account and without root access. Ruby is not supported.

In DirectAdmin open Advanced Features › then Cronjobs, set the schedule and the command to run. Traxio allows intervals down to one minute. For a PHP script, call the PHP binary with the full path to the file rather than fetching its URL.

Usually the path is wrong. Cron doesn’t know your shell’s settings, so use absolute paths for both the PHP binary and your script. Redirect the output to a log file so you can see what actually happened.

Yes. Git is available, and over SSH on port 26628 you can clone and pull a repository straight into your account, which is a much tidier deployment route than uploading files by hand.

Yes. Build the site on your own machine and upload the generated output to public_html — a static site is just files, so it runs as fast as anything can and needs no PHP or database at all.

Yes — create the page, then point the server at it with an ErrorDocument line in .htaccess. A custom 404 that links back to your main sections keeps visitors who hit a dead link rather than losing them.

Outside public_html and outside your repository, in a configuration file the application reads at runtime. Anything inside public_html can potentially be served to a browser, and anything committed to a repository is very hard to remove afterwards.

Apache is long-established web server software, and .htaccess is its per-folder configuration file. The format matters beyond Apache itself because other web servers, including LiteSpeed, read the same file — which is why .htaccess instructions work across most shared hosting.

A prepared statement sends the query and the data to the database separately, so user input can never be interpreted as part of the query. It is the standard defence against SQL injection and PDO or MySQLi support it directly.

Composer is PHP’s dependency manager, used by Laravel, Symfony and most modern PHP projects. The usual approach on shared hosting is to run it on your own machine and upload the resulting vendor/ folder with the rest of your code.