I'm a newbie trying PHP and interested in creating a flat file one level above the root. is this possible on this host? or is there another way to create a secure flat file?

Well you can't move beyond your home directory, but you can prevent access to the file with a .htaccess in the directory you want to protect with the following:



Any request to access that file will result in a 403 'forbidden' error.

Why is it that every coder i know (Excluding me) love HTACCESS so mutch. You could also change the permissions of the file.
And " Bread " you forgot on thing to put in that code

Our hosting doesn't allow 'Files' blocks, so I omitted it on purpose. If you're just protecting a directory, there's not much use to the 'Files' block, just put the .htaccess in the directory.