Web Hosting FAQ 7

My stats report 'file not found' for robots.txt and favicon.ico. Any clues?
Robots.txt is a file that the web spiders (robots) use to check if they are allowed to check through all links of your web site. If they cannot find the file, they assume they are allowed. Favicon.ico is an icon files that old version of IE check for when someone tries to bookmark your site. We now believe that only Netscape browsers use this correctly.

I've had 140,000 requests made to my site. Are these all different visitors?
No. Hits or requests are not the same as visitors. The number of hits includes all images and buttons on your page as well as the page itself. If you had 10 buttons and 5 images, that's 16 hits including the page itself. To get a better idea, you need to look at distinct hosts served.

My stats say I've served 251 distinct hosts. Does this mean I have had 251 individual people visiting the site?
Not exactly, although it's usually a good indicator. There may be more than one person at a single host going through a proxy server. Our server will only log the IP address of the proxy and see this as only one person. Equally, one person may have revisited your site using a different IP address.

Is there any way of not including me in the stats as I visit 6-7 times daily?
Unfortunately not. Our servers aren't aware of your IP address when you check your site.

Someone has told me my website is down. He recommends I buy some monitoring package.
It's likely to be a scam to make you buy this package. Do not trust the word of anyone who tells you your site is down and are selling anything. It's incredibly rare that our hosting is down.

I've tried to upload folders and the remote site has created a folder called XYIZNWSK. What is this?
Dreamweaver creates this directory automatically on the server and should remove it after use. It's most likely used in synchronising the online files with your local files.

Do you support FrontPage and ASP?
We support MS-FrontPage with most of our web hosting packages but we don't support ASP.

I'm debugging a perl script but the full errors are not shown in the error log. How can I see the full error details?
To see the full error details, please add the following line directly under the first line of your perl script...
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

Some of my jpg pictures have bands of corruption running through them and others don't appear at all.
Please check your FTP settings and make sure that you're uploading these in 'binary' mode rather than 'ascii'.

404 error pages don't work with php5.
Add the following to your .htaccess file... RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteRule ^.+\.php$ bogusfile

Find the answer to what is web hosting.

Web hosting is the process of putting your web site on a web server or web host, so everyone connected to the Internet can see it. If you have a permanent connection to the Internet you could host your web site on your own computer, but that is in general not a good idea. A good web host is a real server in a datacenter with a fast high bandwidth connection to the Internet. And, to make sure you can move your web site to another web host, if necessary, you need a web hosting provider that supports domain hosting.


Fortunately, with shared hosting, hosting your web site with a domain name in a reliable datacenter environment is no longer expensive.

Find the answer to what is domain hosting.

Most Internet Service Providers (or ISP) will give you a free web site when they provide you with access to the Internet. They do this because they don't want to give you a permanent IP address, which is what you need if you'd like to host a web site on your own computer. Unfortunately, most ISPs don't support domain hosting with their free web sites. Hence, the URL of your web site is an extension of the URL of your ISP. So what happens when you change ISP? You will have to change the URL and nobody can find you anymore.

The use of a domain name for your web site is absolutely necessary for a professional web site, and to host your own domain you will need to find a real web hosting provider with domain hosting. Many web hosting plans actually include the price of a domain registration, so don't register your domain before you have chosen your web hosting company.

Find the answer to what is a sub domain.

A sub domain is an extension of a domain name that normally points to a subdirectory of a web site. Instead of using the URL http://www.how-to-guides.com/faq/ , which points to the directory FAQ on my site I could have created a sub domain http://www.faq.how-to-guides.com/ to point to that FAQ directory. In this particular example the sub domain is not that more attractive than the original URL, but in some cases a good choice of a domain name and sub domains can result in a big improvement.

Find the answer to what is shared hosting.

In shared hosting a single web server can host hundreds of different web sites instead of just a single web site. As a result, the cost of web hosting is reduced drastically. If the load on the server is properly managed, there is no reason why shared hosting cannot be high quality hosting.

Shared hosting will also normally imply that you share the same IP address with the other web sites, and there is some concern that a web site that does try to spam a search engine may get that IP address blocked. I have used shared hosting for several web sites for many years and never encountered any problems. I must assume that the search engines are clever enough to realise that most web sites use shared hosting. However, if you like to avoid this potential problem you might consider virtual hosting with your own IP address.

Find the answer to what is virtual hosting.

Virtual hosting is often used as a synonym for shared hosting, e.g. you host your web site on a web server with hundreds of other web sites and you share the IP address with these web sites.

The term virtual hosting should imply, however, that while you share the web server it looks from the outside world that you are the only web site on that server. That means that with virtual hosting you should not only have your own IP address, but also a dedicated bandwidth to the Internet and a dedicated slice of the computers processing power. So, if a web hosting provider uses the term virtual hosting, have a close look if these features are offered before you decide on paying a premium price above standard shared hosting.

Find the answer to what is UNIX hosting.

UNIX hosting is the predominant form of cheap hosting based on servers running a Unix like operating system. Unix (or its free cousin Linux) is an alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating systems and has become very popular because of the availability of a many free or low cost tools and applications such as the Apache web server software.

Whether your hosting provider uses a Windows server operating system or a UNIX operating system is in most cases not important for your web hosting situation, but does reflect in the price. So, even when you run Microsoft Windows at home, you can still host your web site on a UNIX server to save money.

Find the answer to what is a webmaster.

A webmaster is someone who has the responsibility of managing a web site. Most web masters not only oversee the day to day running of the web site and its web hosting, but also develop new pages for the web site and optimize and promote the web site for the search engines. So, when you decide to design your own web site and start looking for a suitable web hosting provider, you have become a web master.

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