Today I did a Google search for my domain name, and found a message board where someone had posted a URL that appeared to link to a page inside my domain. For the sake of example, my domain is domain.com. The link I found goes to www.domain.com/~username (I have withheld the actual domain name because it is used for business purposes). When I go to that URL, it contains someone's blog. I'm confused because it appears to be a part of my website - however I don't see anything unusual when I look at the files on my web server. Leaving off the ~username at the end of the URL takes me to my regular website. What's going on? If you have any thoughts, please reply!! Thank you.

that ~username is (I think) being used on most shared hosting to separate their client's account. Are you in a shared hosting company? For the sake of example :P Let's say your account name in the hosting company is Alex. So (possibly) you can access your root folder by using http://whateverdomaininthesameIP/~Alex Even you can access your account by using this way when you don't have your domain set (as long as your account is set in the server) You can send an email to your host and ask them to do something, or you can ask the blogger directly to stop using your domain (if you don't like what he's doing)

Your provider is probably hosting multiple sites/accounts on a unix host. By default, any domain that points to a box in which a user has an account, the same can be used to gain access to that account. In other words, if yourdomain.com is hosted on a unix box that also hosts mydomain.com, I could probably ftp to yourdomain.com and access my account by providing my username and login credentials since I have a valid account on the same host (this assumes that the FTP software doesn't have the ability to recognize and refuse connections from users who request connection using a domain with which they aren't associated). How a user ends up at the server box is immaterial as far as she gets there. That being said, some server softwares have the ability to act on certain environment variables that are passed after the connection process. For instance, the Apache Web Server can host multiple domains on a single IP address because it can look at information provided by the connection, such as what domain name the user requested, and act accordingly. I suspect that there are ways to configue Apache to disallow users to access their Websites via domains with which they aren't associated but I think that typically, this is allowed by default! I just verified this on one of my linux hosting servers and am going to research it a little to see just what can be done within Apache to control this. Basically it comes down to the fact that if multiple domains point to the same IP address, you can and will arrive at that IP address by resolving any of those domains regardless the connection type requested. Oh, and the default document root in Apache for system users is, "hostname.com/~username." Hope that helps a little... k_Rob - kk7av

Correction: "hostname.com/~username" specifies the home directory for the user but often times there's a directory within the user's home directory that's specified as the user's document root as configured in Apache's configuration file. k_Rob - kk7av