var/www to home/user/public_html?

Question

Hello, I’m newbie on VPS configuration but I learn quick. I have a doubt about the server arquitecture.

I want to have my VPS as clean as possible, and in my old webhost server I could see I have two folders with the exact same info: var/www and /public_html

As I understand, var/ww is a backup of /public_html which is the folder where Internet users go when they visit my website, is that correct?

How can I do that on my VPS?

My thoughts tell me that I can create the folder for each site on /home/user/public_html and create the FTP users with limited privileges, but what happens with the var/www folder?

Kamal Nasser · Answer

var/ww is a backup of /public_html

/var/www the webserver’s default documentroot. Shared hosting panels use slightly different directory names and paths but you don’t have to do the same.

My thoughts tell me that I can create the folder for each site on /home/user/public_html

You can do that but it’s preferred to create a directory for each site in /var/www e.g. /var/www/example.com/public_html /var/www/example2.org/public_html and then storing the files in the corresponding public_html directories.

As for FTP, don’t do that. Use SFTP instead: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-use-filezilla-to-transfer-and-manage-files-securely-on-your-vps . It’s installed by default and it much more secure.

FMCB · Answer

you can always create a custom folder to point your OS to the root of your vhost.

what is your OS? Nginx or Aapche?

farooqyousuf1 · Answer

Kamal,

Mistakingly I put my site contents directly in /var/www and not in /var/www/example.com/public_html. Everything is working fine. I’ve a LAMP Wordpress running.

Do you think I should move all the files from /var/www to /var/www/example.com/public_html? If I move the files, do you think it will cause any issues for my sites?

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var/www to home/user/public_html?

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var/www to home/user/public_html?