First off, the server doesn't delete ANYTHING unless you tell it to. As for where to put files: I'm not sure what you mean by "up to a certain area." FTP clients choose what path they want to start at, so it's up to your client what that first folder actually is. As a general idea though, most start in your home directory... /home/username/ (which is also aliased as ~) The root of your website is the public_html folder. That would be known as /home/username/public_html/ or simply ~/public_html/ .htaccess files are per-directory config files for the webserver only. While the server will read those as it walks the directory tree on the way to public_html, it makes no sense to put them outside of the website hierarchy like that. As for php files there, it is possible they'd run, but only if some rewrite rule redirected a request back outside of the normal hierarchy. Keep in mind that not every server is setup like this one, so those instructions may be intended for some different folder layout. Or they could be doing something really weird that doesn't occur to me. Bottom line: Just try it, you can always delete stuff if it doesn't work.
