3 of the Most Frequently Asked Web Hosting Support Questions

All top web hosting companies will have multiple outlets for you to receive support. Along with phone, chat, and email support, most web hosts have forums and knowledgebases that you can access at your convenience. Lately, I’ve been browsing some of the forums and support pages and have found that certain questions often appear quite frequently. Here are three of the most common questions along with some thoughts.

1. How do you uninstall WordPress?
There are a couple of ways you can accomplish deleting your WordPress installation. If you installed WP with a tool like Fantastico, you could use that same tool to do the uninstall. But I would not recommend this approach—especially if you have multiple WordPress installs. I’ve run into problems with Fantastico deleting not just the specified WP installation, but some other WP installations that I didn’t want to get rid of.

The better approach is to manually delete the WordPress directory that contains the installation you want to remove with your File Manager or FTP client. Also, remember to delete your MySQL database with a tool like phpMyAdmin. Above all, be sure to backup all of your data before you attempt to delete anything!

2. How do I find my email server?
Usually, your incoming and outgoing email server is mail.yourdomain.com. So, if your website domain is mycoolsite.com then your email server would be mail.mycoolsite.com.

3. How can I password protect my entire website?
If you have cPanel, you can use the Password Protect a Directory feature.
For your main domain, password protect the public_html directory.
For an addon domain, password protect the domain.com folder under the public_html directory.

If you need more information, or if you have a different hosting interface, be sure to contact your web host.