FAQ - web hosting

	Do you put adverts on my website?
	Vision Internet Limited never place adverts on any hosting packages.

	If I buy hosting from you, can I use any ISP to upload my files?
	Yes, you can use any ISP of your choice.

	Can I use flash animation (.swf files) on my hosting?
	Yes, you can use flash animation with any of our hosting packages.

	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 WS_FTP. Internet Exploror can also be used to upload files to your space. Please click here for more information.

	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 either the html or mainwebsite_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.htm, 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.

	I wish to sell your hosting on at a profit. Is this allowed?
	Certainly, no problem. We only contact the administrator of an account and not the registrant of the domain name.

	Can I upgrade my hosting?
	Certainly. You can do this at any time. Please contact us as we calculate the time left on your present package and trade that in against the time difference on the new package. We will confirm the price with you, send you information on how to pay for this and upgrade the account.

	What is your uptime rate?
	We are one of the top hosting companies in the UK for reliability. It would be unusual for us not to have a 100% 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 over to us. Please see our page on moving a domain name or contact us with more details.

	I don't really like/trust hit counters. Is there an alternative?
	If you have a hosting package with us that includes site statistics, then yes. 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 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 Microsoft FrontPage and ASP?
	Microsoft stopped supporting FrontPage in 2006. Although we don't directly support this, it is still possible to upload using FrontPage. We don't support ASP on any of our servers.

	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'.