Hi, I have a htaccess in my public_html (and one for each other site) but should there be one in the in the very TOP LEVEL DIRECTORY folder (which holds trash, logs, mail etc) ?

if so, could you tell me what should be in it ? I want my other sites to run on their own htaccess.

Thanks

No. public_html is the highest web-accessible directory (your root, which HTML sees as "/"). Any .htaccess file above that (/home/ACCOUNTNAME/) will be ignored and is useless, because the Web cannot access that directory via HTTP. A hacker who has planted a script file (such as .php) could use it to read or write files above public_html, but .htaccess won't be processed when a script is run.

That was great MrPhil!  Thanks for the explanation.