What is the home directory? What is the path to it?

This article will explain the home directory and what the path is to the home directory for your account.

What is the home directory?

The home directory is the main directory for your website, including your "public_html" and "www" folders, among others.

You will put all files and folders that you want to associate with your public website in either the "public_html" or "www" folder. They are symbolically linked, so using either one is fine.

What is the path to the "home" directory?

The path to your "home" directory is:

• /home/<username>

Replace <username> with your cPanel username in the example above. You can find your cPanel username in your account's welcome e-mail if you are an unlimited, performance, or reseller hosting customer.

If you are a VPS or dedicated server customer, replace <username> with the username of the cPanel account you create in WebHostManager (WHM).

What are these other folders I'm seeing in my home directory? Do I need them?

We recommend leaving the folders in your home directory in-place as they are used by different system services and for features such as website statistics. In particular, these folders are critical to the operation of different services on any cPanel account:

• etc (email and FTP configuration)
• logs (archived logs of your FTP and web traffic)
• lscache (used by the web caching service - will be re-created if removed)
• mail (email storage folder)
• ssl (stores SSL information)
• tmp (stores website stat reports)

Have any questions?

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact Geek Support.