2 Questions about bluehost directory structure

[ryanryan]

1. What is the difference between the 'public_html' folder and the 'www' folder, if any? They both seem to contain the exact same things. Is this using up twice as much disk space as necessary? Or is this a pretty standard arrangement for a hosting provider? I only use the 'public_html' folder, but is there ever a reason to use the 'www' folder?

2. What do you guys use the other folders for? I suppose the 'public ftp' folder is pretty obvious, you'd use that for files that ftp users should have access to but not web users, right? But what about other folders? Under what circumstances would you use any of them? Just wondering… Looking for an education.

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Ryan

[dkinzer]

1. What is the difference between the 'public_html' folder and the 'www' folder, if any? They both seem to contain the exact same things. Is this using up twice as much disk space as necessary?
The www directory (folder or folder as you've called it) is a symbolic link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link) to the public_html directory. That means, essentially, that 'www' is an alias for 'public_html'. The content is not duplicated.

I suspect that the reason they create the symbolic link for you is that some scripts expect the directory to exist and to contain the directory tree for a website.

2. What do you guys use the other folders for?
I use other folders (outside of the public_html directory tree) for files that I don't want to be available to web browsers, e.g. special scripts, log files, configuration data, etc. While it is true that I could just password-protect those directories, I prefer just to not have them in the web tree.

[Early Out]

BH also uses some of those other directories to store things relating to your webmail accounts, to the collected stats for awstats and Webalizer, and so on.

In short, if you don't understand what's there, it's best not to go deleting things willy-nilly!