Greetings (again) and some detailed questions

Greetings all,

Hi, I'm Chris. Used to subscribe to this list over a year ago, now I'm back
because I've got some rather detailed questions to ask.

My ISP is Inficad here in PHX. Some of you undoubtedly use them too. Their
tech-support is geared more toward that Other OS, you know the one.

PLUGins are pretty savvy folk so undoubtedly have experience with Perl, CGI
and HTTP authentication using htpasswd/htaccess.

Assume my username is blah .
For this specific ISP, these are my questions:

When you set up your directory structure by ftp'ing to their server, where
are you in the directory hierarchy? For example, am I in ~blah or
~blah/public_html? Trying pwd doesn't come back with anything useful - I
expected to see a full path like /home/users/~blah.

Either way, do I create my cgi-bin directory adjacent to or beneath the
public_html directory? ( public_html is where I'm supposed to put the file
index.html that constitutes my home page). I'd think adjacent to but am not
sure.

Does this ISP support HTTP authentication? That is, can I execute htpasswd
from a telnet session to create the user file that works with the .htaccess
file in my public_html directory to control access to my page?
Authentication to a directory allows access to that dir and all children
dirs - this is why I believe my cgi-bin dir should NOT be a child dir but
rather adjacent to public_html.

Any answers/ideas/suggestions (except those telling me where to go) are
welcome.

Thanks,

Chris