Dreamhost document root for private servers

Posted by Matt Thommes on 10/4/2008

I recently switched to Dreamhost PS from a standard Dreamhost shared hosting account for all of my domains. Dreamhost claims the process is seamless and you shouldn't have to make any changes.

However, I noticed one thing, and I thought I'd document it here.

The absolute path to your document root changes when you switch to a Dreamhost PS. This immediately had an effect on all of my domains since I specify that path in top-level htaccess scripts that control content output.

Once the DNS resolved, all of my sites were showing an "internal server error" message.

The old, shared hosting format of my document root used to look like this:

/home/[username]/[domain name]

... where [username] is your Dreamhost username/account name, and [domain name] is the domain name. Here's an example:

/home/joe655/mysite.com

With Dreamhost PS, the format changes:

/mnt/local/home/[username]/[domain name]

Example:

/mnt/local/home/joe655/mysite.com

Dreamhost didn't specify this in any documentation when I converted to one of their private servers. Perhaps it's now listed somewhere, but a nice "word of warning" about this would have been helpful.

Turns out this is a relatively small change to make, but depending on how many places you specify that path, you may have a lot of tedious pasting to do.

About the author(s)

Matt is an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from a suburb of Chicago. Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.

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