RE: [PHP] Problems installing smarty on a shared host

[snip] You'll probably notice that the permissions for /home/pablogosse are like: drwxr-x--- with user:group pablogosse:pablogosse If you have permissions to, i would set up a directory like: /home/virtual/site357/fst/var/include/smarty/ And then set the include_path appropriatly. [/snip] Unfortunately I don't have write access to /var as it is owned by root. I've just discovered another thing which makes me even more nervous. I just wrote a script as a quick test and I was able to use file_get_contents to read a file out of another user's webroot. So, anyone who is storing passwords or other valuable information under their webroot risks having that information being easily accessible to anyone else hosting here. As I said earlier, most of my experience until now has been in situations where the sites I've worked on have been hosted on dedicated servers, and this has never been a problem. Is this a common set up for shared hosting? Is there any way around this? Cheers and TIA, Pablo