InfinityFree Glossary - Terminology and their definitions

Documentation Getting Started
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When interacting with InfinityFree services and asking for help, you may come across a wide variety of different terms and designations, used in our services, in our documentation articles, and in topics on our forum. In order to better make sense of this, and be able to effectively communicate, this article contains a list of some commonly used, and sometimes misunderstood, terminology.

Panels and Tools

  • Client Area: The main panel of InfinityFree where you can manage all the services you have with us. It is the system located at https://dash.infinityfree.com.
  • Control Panel: The panel you use to manage an individual hosting account. It’s found at https://cpanel.infinityfree.com
    • The client area nowadays also has most features of the control panel integrated. When we talk about the control panel, we mean the separate panel, not the integrated features.
  • File Manager: The web-based interface we provide for you to manage the files on your hosting account. It’s the interface found at filemanager.ai
  • FTP Client: Software you use to interact with our FTP server. This is typically software that’s installed on your own device. Multiple FTP clients exist, but FileZilla is the most popular one.

Entities You Have

  • Client Area Profile: The thing you use to login to the client area at https://dash.infinityfree.com. It holds all the services you get from us, such as hosting accounts, SSL certificates, etc.
  • Hosting Account: A container for websites, files and databases. It’s identified by a username (e.g. if0_12345678).
  • Domain Name: A specific domain, subdomain or hostname that you can host a website on. It’s identified by the domain, e.g. example.com or example.great-site.net.

A single client area profile can have up to three hosting accounts, and a single hosting account can have any number of domain names.

Files and Directories

  • Root Folder: This is the main directory of your hosting account. If you open the file manager, this is what you will see. Typically, it does not contain any files directly (except for one named DO NOT UPLOAD FILES HERE), and instead all files and directories for your website are located in sub folders.
  • Home Directory: Alternative name for a Root Folder.
  • Website Directory: A directory on your account that contains all the website files for a particular domain name on your account.
    • For the first domain an account this is usually called htdocs/, for domains added later it’s usually something like example.com/htdocs/.
    • You can find the website directory of your domains in the Client Area by navigating to Accounts → (your account) → Domains.
  • Document Root: Alternative name for Website Directory.
  • Index File: A file with the name index.php, index.html or index.htm. If you try to load a website without specifying a specific file name to load, the server will look for a file with this name in the directory you are trying to load.
  • Htaccess file: A file with the name .htaccess. It contains rules that determine how the server should handle certain requests on your site.
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