Can’t view website on virtual linux server

dannyflynn said 2 years, 6 months ago:

I’m making some stupid mistake I know, but I am a new virtual dedicated server user, and I cannot view my website on the Web! It’s http://cooltowndeals.com, and all it shows is the blank index page. That’s in 2 browsers and through a proxy server, so I don’t think it’s just me. It’s just not there! The files are there, as I see when FTPing in. A bunch of PHP files, but also some html files, and surfing to any file by name goes to page cannot be displayed. Same with just surfing to directories other than public_html. ANy ideas? What the heck am I doing wrong??!

wayan said 2 years, 6 months ago:

Are you certain you’re FTPing to /app/webroot and is /app/webroot where you want your files? On my dedicated server with fedora and simple control panel I upload to /home/website_name/public_html. I don’t know about other control panels or other linux distributions. Your apache configuration file httpd.conf sets the location of your website files.

dannyflynn said 2 years, 6 months ago:

Well, the OS is CentOS 5, for what it’s worth, with Simple Control Panel, but all of the files are under public_html, which I think is where they belong. I wasn’t aware that I would have to configure Apache at all. Weird. I can see all of the files there with FTP. It’s all basically PHP, with index.php, which isn’t viewable, but I even put up a default.html, and that didn’t come up either! Grrr. I’ll hopefully get an answer from Godaddy.

ShelLuser said 2 years, 6 months ago:

First of all, not to nitpick but you’re in the /dedicated/ forum; not the one aimed at virtual dedicated. Reason I’m mentioning it is because I can see that others (like myself) who also have a VDS wouldn’t always look in here.

Now; as to your problem.. How did you setup the website on your server? You have the simple control panel; did you also create a domain entry there?

Because by default the VDS is setup in a way where you’d create a user account for every website (‘domain’) you want after which you can put the website inside the users ‘public_html’ directory. But obviously this doesn’t mean that any public_html directory will suffice.

Still, from my tests I can determine this not to be the case since I get clear errors when checking stuff like “index.html” (404 not found) whereas index.php simply doesn’t show anything.

So the main question here is obviously: what exactly did you setup there? Is this index.php part of a bigger program (a blog or cms or so) or a stand alone file?

A good way to check what is going on is to check the logfiles of the webserver. To my knowledge this cannot be done using the control panel, so you’d need to logon using SSH.

Check: /var/log/httpd and see what files are in there. If you don’t know for sure which logfile to look into simply check /etc/httpd/conf.d/turbopanel.conf up front (provided that you did indeed set this up using the control panel).

You’d be looking for a line in the likes of “CustomLog …..”. Don’t get “logs” confuse you; this basically refers back to /var/log/httpd.

Then look into that logfile to see what the server tells you.

A good tip for commandline usage is to get the midnight commander. An invaluable tool for easy file access. Use: “yum install mc.386″ for that (as root, so you’d need sudo); start with “mc”.

hope this gives you some ideas!

chrisg said 2 years, 6 months ago:

@dannyflynn,

I’m just checking in to see if you were still needing assistance in this matter? Did the suggestions provided by @shelluser help out?

I also wanted to point out that you can also submit a trouble ticket to our Server Support team to research your account for assistance if necessary. To submit a trouble ticket, simply follow the instructions outlined in the article below:

http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/4596

Beyond this, do keep us posted if there is anything else we can attempt to assist you with.

Christopher G.