Being unfamiliar with the hosting terrain is often par for the course in freelancing, as Peggy points out.
I was working on a new website as a freelancer. The term freelancer means you don't know much about the hosting account itself and only have FTP access with a login/password for FTP access. No problem.
The website was a subdomain of another site on a host I was unfamiliar with (host will remain nameless). The setup was different from my own. So I went to work, doing the usual and uploaded the site. After upload, I always take a look at a site to be sure everything is there and working. To my surprise, the site was not there. What?
After a bit of investigative work, I found that subdomains on this host are in a subfolder, rather than above the /www/www/ root as mine are, i.e., /www/subdomain/.
I had inadvertantly overwritten the main website, a family page that I had not even developed!
Fortunately, as a freelancer, one of the things I learned from the company I work with is to create a copy of any page I overwrite, i.e., index-old.html. I was able to replace the content and put the new site where it belonged!
At least she backed things up!
