Frequently Asked Questions!
Free web hosting Frequently Asked Questions/ FAQ`s
| Do you put adverts on my website? | |
| Stonerocket will never place adverts on any free hosting account. | |
| Can I use flash animation (.swf files) on my hosting? | |
| Yes, you can use flash animation and .flv video`s. | |
| What type of servers are you running? | |
| Our servers are custom built to our own specification. They run Linux operating systems with Apache web server. This makes them very reliable and fast. | |
| How do I get my files to my web site? | |
| You need to use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) package such as Cute FTP or Smart FTP. Internet Explorer/firefox can also be used to upload files to your free web space. | |
| I have uploaded my site but I still see your site reserved page. Why? | |
| There could be one of two reasons. You may have uploaded your site to the wrong directory. Your web site should be uploaded to the public_html directory. Alternatively, you may not have overwritten (replaced) the index.html file already in the html directory. If your home page is called index.html or index.php, make sure you delete the index.html file currently there. | |
| I keep getting an error 403 - Forbidden message when I visit my site. | |
| You've removed the index.html file. If you have a file there called index.html, make sure that it's in lower case. Linux based servers use case sensitive characters. Some web servers will list all the contents of folders that don't have an index.html file. This is incredibly bad for security and we don't allow this on any of our servers. Hence the error message. | |
| Can I upgrade my free hosting? | |
| Certainly. we do allow upgrading of your free hosting package such as extra mySQL database, bandwidth etc. Please note we do not allow for web space to be upgraded! To have your account upgraded please contact us asking what you would like to be upgraded. | |
| What is your uptime rate? | |
| We are one of the top free web hosting providers in the world for reliability. It would be unusual for us not to have a 98% figure for any given month. Obviously we occasionally need to take the server down for planned maintenence. When this happens, we inform our clients that the service will be down and try to give an indication as to how long for. | |
| How secure is your server? | |
| We take security very seriously and apply patches and new versions of software when available. | |
| My current 'free web space' provider is too slow. Will your hosting be faster? | |
| We're likely to be faster than your free hosting provider due to server location and less over-crowding of hosting accounts. | |
| My website is currently down and my hosting and domain name provider cannot be contacted. Is it possible to move my site to you? | |
| In most cases, yes. You will need to move the domain name servers over to us. Please contact us with more details. | |
| I don't really like free hit counters. Is there an alternative? | |
| Our free hosting package includes site statistics, This will give you an indication as to the number of visitors on all your web pages rather than one with a hit counter on it. | |
| 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 file that old versions of IE check for when someone tries to bookmark your site. We now believe that only Netscape, Opera and Firefox browsers use this correctly. | |
| I've had 50,000 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 had 251 unique visitors. 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, how do i check? | |
| It's incredibly rare that our hosting is down. The best way to check if your site is up (if hosted by us) is to check out our live server statisics page at Live Server Stats. | |
| 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 on our free web hosting package 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 | |
