Archive for category: how to

Are you trying to stage your site before your domain name gets pointed over to your GoDaddy hosted account? Probably like me, you may be frustrated with how difficult it is to set up a staging area to view your site. And GoDaddy doesn’t offer this information, so hopefully this post will save you some time.  It’s actually easy to do once you know how.

First login in to your GoDaddy cPanel account. For this tutorial, we’ll assume you are using WordPress and have already installed it to your account.

Check the URL you’re logged into GoDaddy. It will look something like this: https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/cpsess1234567890/frontend/gl_paper_lantern/index.html

You will need this part of the GoDaddy URL: https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/

Also take note of this info in your GoDaddy control panel:

Open up your File Manager, then the wp-config.php file.

Underneath the PHP line at the top
* @package WordPress
*/

Paste the following:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”HTTPS://YOURTEMPORARYGODADDYDOMAIN/”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”HTTPS://YOURTEMPORARYGODADDYDOMAIN/”);

Next, replace the HTTPS://YOURTEMPORARYGODADDYDOMAIN/ with your GoDaddy link so it will look something like this:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/”);

Then add a tilde “~” to the end of the URLS followed by your account ID which in this example is j8a882820s. Follow it with a forward slash “/”

The links should now look like this:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/”);

Save the file.

If all goes well, you should be able to go to the link and view your temporary WordPress site: https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net:2083/~j8a882820s/

https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net:2083/~j8a882820s/wp-admin should also work fine to login and continue updating your WordPress site.

Once you take your site live, make sure to remove the two lines from your wp-config.php file otherwise your website will redirect to the staging area.

For temporary URLs for add on domains, add the subfolder to the link. Example:

define(“WP_SITEURL”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/myotherdomain.com”);
define(“WP_HOME”,”https://h2kjkh101.prod.iad2.secureserver.net/~j8a882820s/myotherdomain.com”);

*Note these links are fake and don’t work. They are just for examples for this tutorial.

If you own a WordPress website and have the Sucuri plugin installed, there’s a good chance you may have received email alerts stating there was an attempted login with the following message like this:

“Explanation: Someone failed to login to your site. If you are getting too many of these messages, it is likely your site is under a password guessing brute-force attack [1]. You can disable the failed login alerts from here [2]. Alternatively, you can consider to install a firewall between your website and your visitors to filter out these and other attacks, take a look at Sucuri CloudProxy [3].“

Sucuri gives you a few options to deal with these annoying attempts to gain access to your website. One of the options is to install their Website Firewall. This is a great recommendation as this can prevent these attacks from ever even hitting your site at the WordPress level. But if you have multiple websites like I do, this can start racking up quite a monthly expense.

An alternative option is to add password protection on top of your wp-login.php page. Listed below are a few steps you can follow but if you don’t do it right you can get a “500 – Internal Server Error”. This can be remedied by taking the following steps to protect your login area:

Step 1: Create a .htpasswd file by using the .htpasswd generator here. Make sure to take note of your user name and password otherwise you won’t be able to login to your own site.

Step 2: Follow the directions here and add the suggested script to your .htaccess file in your WordPress root folder. Make sure to switch out the user name to the one you made in the .htpasswd file where it says “require user mysecretuser”

Step 3: Once the .htpasswd and .htaccess files have been updated and added to your hosting account try to log in to your website at domain.com/wp-login.php to see if the new popup window works. Enter in the new user credentials you created in step 1. If you see the WordPress login fields after the popup window you did it right.

But if not, this is where it might have gone wrong. The line “AuthUserFile ~/.htpasswd” needs to be changed to the proper full file system path. If it’s incorrect, you will most likely get an annoying “500 – Internal Server Error”.

Here’s what you need to do next. Create a file called anything dot php. For this example simply call it root.php. Add this code to the file, save and upload to your root folder:

<?php
echo $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’];
?>

Go to your domain.com/root.php and you’ll get the exact full file system path. Copy and paste it into “AuthUserFile ~/.htpasswd”. It should now look something like “AuthUserFile /home/yourhostingaccountname/public_html/domain.com/.htpasswd”

Update your .htaccess file and you should be good to go. If the code above doesn’t work, go here to grab the code instead.

Once everything is working properly, make sure to remove your root.php file!