simplyjond

Hi Bill, thanks for the info. Perhaps it would be better to set the stats back to running in the early hours of the morning (like 4am)? I can understand that it must be busy during the day and therefore we're getting slippage until demand drops off. Maybe that's why they used to run in the middle of the night?. thanks,

Hi Bill, thanks for the prompt response. I'm on Server34 and as I write this I see that the stats were last published at 13:04 on 11th - so it's slipped again. thanks,

Can anyone help me understand why AWSTATS info is appearing later and later. I review these regularly - it's been a big help to me to see what's popular and from where etc. When I first started looking in beginning September they were being published at 4am (not that I was up to see them but that's what it said). Over the last 6 weeks publication time has been slipping and I think it's now at 12 noon. Can anyone enlighten me, please? thanks, simplyjond

Congratulations Bill From my experience, TCH is already headand shoulders above the BBB standards anyway -so I think it's their gain more than TCH's simplyjond

Mr Bill - thanks for the info, I'll look and see what's causing the problems. I think you could be right as there is a java script there. Scott - I guess patience is not one of my strongest suits. I'll try holding my breath for 30 days and see if that helps thanks to all - your input and advice is much appreciated. simplyjond

Will do. Thanks for the prompt reply.

I signed up for TCH at end of August and I thought I'd wait til now (October) before providing feedback. One of the resons for waiting was to see if the service in the post-sales period and day-to-day activity was any different than in pre-sales. Q. How did I hear about TCH? A. I got the initial link via a site called www.yourhostsucks.com (YHS). TotalChoiceHosting was recommended in glowing terms by people who had bad experiences with other vendors. I was using the YHS site to try and reduce my long list of about 25 possible suppliers. Q. Why did I select TCH? A. Using a number of sources, I got down to a short-list of 3 possibles - all of which were receiving favorable reviews from the vast majority of current users. The balance was tipped towards TCH by a few factors:- i. the TCH users forum was a major influence. Not only was the community support better than anywhere else I had seen, but TCH are brave enough and confident enough to allow negative postings and show them thru to conclusion (warts and all). No-one gets it right all the time so seeing how problems were dealt with was important. I saw one particular situation where TCH refunded someone their money despite the fact that TCH were clearly not at fault and even the complainant recognised that at the end - but wanted out anyway. ii. TCH provided a low cost, low risk entry level. 30 day money back guarantee and the ability to quit on one month's notice. So even if I made a wrong choice, I could exercise damage limitation quickly and cheaply. My no.2 choice offered the 30 day guarantee but insisted on a year paid in advance contract. iii. I sent a number of pre-sales questions to each of my 3 short-list vendors to gauge the credibility, speed, and helpfulness of their responses. I also investigated up-time commitments and statistics. To be honest all 3 were good including TCH. So the two factors above were what made me choose TCH. Q. Did I have any problems getting started? A. Yes, I had a number of minor issues in the course of getting my site up and running. Some of these were my fault (I confess); some were misunderstandings of what was required; some were limitations in systems/software capabilities. The important thing to me is that when I contacted TCH support, I received quick, courteous and helpful replies. This was a consistent experience irrespective of which support person dealt with the issue/query. For example, I had an issue with using TCH mail-forwarding in concert with third-party auto-responder services. TCH bust a gut to get to the root of the problem even though at times it didn't seem as if it was being caused by them. The third-party company gave up helping before a solution was found - it was taking too much support effort. (The problem was system/software limitiations on both sides and required a work-around solution.) Q. Were there any major issues? A. No. As I've said above, the problems were all minor. Since they occured, TCH have published even better guides and notes - so I probably wouldn't encounter those again. The proof point for me was that my site was up and running on 1 September, on schedule, as planned. Q. Is the level of support related to the level of spend with TCH? A. I was putting up my first site with TCH and therefore was very careful about the financial commitments I was making in case I wanted to get out quick. I only signed up for the most basic package and I took it on a monthly basis, so I could get out easily if I had a bad experience. I think therefore it's fair to say that my $4.00 a month does not make me TCH's most important customer. The level of support I've received has been consistently excellent, from pre-sales all the way thru to on-going day-to-day operations. Q. Would I recommend TCH to my best friend? A. Yes, without hesitation. In fact, I have recommended TCH to others and one is in the process of transferring his web site (www.brassmonkeys.com) to TCH. His current vendor was ripping him off and is now being a pain in the **** during the transfer process - further evidence to him that the move is worthwhile. Q. Any other comments or feedback? A. The TCH forum has proved to be even better than I had expected - in terms of value to me personally and the support and advice you can give/get. It is a major benefit of being with TCH. I have also taken advantage of the initial free Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) advice from TCH and that has helped me in a big way. Q. How much is TCH paying me to say these things? A. Nada, zero, nothing. TCH haven't asked me to write this review - I'm doing it because I want to. TCH doesn't even offer payment for referrrals - but that doesn't stop me from recommending them to others. I have never felt more confident about recommending any vendor. Q. There must be something I don't like? A. Only one thing so far - the TCH Search Engine submission facilities that I intended to use are not very good at all. I've dropped that from my plans and made other arrangements to get my site known. Q. Last Words? A. I am currently planning further sites and intend to use TotalChoiceHosting for every one of them. If you offered me a different host at half the price, I still wouldn't switch. What more could I possibly say!!

Hi Guys, not sure if this is strictly a pre-sales question since I have a site up and running already, but I couldn't figure out where else to put this question. I joined TCH in August and elected to pay monthly using my PayPal account. The charges are going thru fine - August and September were charged and paid so no problems there. I just wondered how I get TCH invoices for my financial records? I thought they might come by e-mail but I don't seem to have received any yet. I know the values are not high and I hate to be a bother, but I am planning further sites (all to be hosted by TCH when I'm ready to launch them) and the lack of paperwork could prove an issue for tax etc. purposes. thanks.

Hi Scott, sorry for the delay in replying - it wasn't personal, I've just been travelling and have been hard put to keep the site going let alone anything else!! I value and appreciate your feedback and whenever I could make time I put a lot of effort into revamping based on your and other feedback. So, - done away with frames and introduced navigation below the header bar for key pages (or a link to home page for non-key pages) - changed the entry point for the site to be the Latest Tale rather than the home page - introduced archive material giving people access to previous Tales - introduced a new "airline humor" page - tidied up the code - worked on the keywords (reduction) and introduced JonD and Jon David to those There has already been some positive results from the above effort: - the average time visitors spend on site has increased significantly this is obviosuly realted to an increased number of pages that they access) - in key word phrases like "Travel Warrior" and "Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich", the simplyjond site is on page #1 in google and visitors are now coming from those searches I can only say thanks for your feedback and assistance. Despite all the above, I still have a page rank of zero on Google. The site is being linked to from at least 3 other sites plus I'm an active participator in a number of travel related forums and always post my signature complete with site address (I can see these are coming up when I do Google searches). I have submitted related site information to Alexa (but this is not being reflected in the site listing there). I have also submitted twice to the Open Directory - to no avail. So I still have a question, please? Am I missing something obvious or doing something very wrong to not have a page rank on Google? thanks,

Hi All, can I join the family, please :hug: ? I think this is the information you require: 1. http://www.simplyjond.com 2. Name: JonD's Tales from a Travel Warrior 3. Description: Tales & Things for Frequent Travelers - including stories, experiences, free items, and travel tools. 4. I can confirm there is link back to TCH (both graphic and text), see bottom right of home page Rock Sign 5. Rank evaluation would be sueful, please. Many thanks ,

Hi Peggy, First of all, welcome to to the TCH family. (I think you've made a great choice coming here.) I'm relatively new also, but I might be able to help a little since such problems are still fresh in my mind. At TCH the system automatically looks for a specific named page on on entry to your domain. You therefore need to have a pge named index.html (I think there are a couple of other variations allowed maybe Index.html or index.htm etc..) So I suggest you rename or copy the page you want as your start-up page to index.html. That should at least get you off and running. Hope this helps. Best of luck .

Great help - thanks all. I'll have another go at this, I think.

Hi Jim, two quick questions from my first read thru the thread: 1. does using php and includes have an adverse effect on search engine crawlers? I know that frames unless set up correctly can confuse the hell out of the robots, wondered of php needed to be set up in a special also? 2. I run all testing on my own laptop before FTPing up to TCH for going live. How would I be able to continue doing this if I start using php? [my laptop under windows doesn't seem to cope with php statements IE is ignoring them] many thanks,

Hi Jim, many thanks. I knew that the thread was out there somewhere but for the life of me I just couldn't find it . I'll check it out now and see if I can make use of it. Thanks for the offer of further help - I may need it. Great to have this sort of support behind you Rock Sign

Hi Mitzi, I've been going thru the same process also - eliminating error where I can. The favicon doesn't seem to be anything to worry about - in fact considering how small it has to be, I'm not convinced it's worth the effort at this stage. I did start using a robots.txt file after I found out what it was for. For example, I discovered that one of the search engines had indexed a download page of mine and that people could get the freebie without registering. So I've named that page in the Robots.txt file under the "disallow" category so that it won't happen anymore. Similarly I put my error page in there in the same way - to stop it getting indexed and/or entered directly. Hope this helps. Seems that all us Newbies travel a similar path at different times.

Hi Guys, I'd like to usae "include" type statements as it would simplify my work enormously in setting up new pages to a set standard and also in changing that standard without editing each page in turn. Howevemr whane I tried a test with the line <!--#include virtual="header.htm"--> It didn't work - I just got a blank screen. Any thoughts on what am I doing wrong? thanks,

Hi, I recently changed the e-mail address I use for the Forum and had a couple of problems that perhaps could be addressed. 1. I found the security code was extremely difficult to read in particular the 8s and 0s were easy to mix-up. Took me 3 attempts to get it right. 2. I didn't realise that the change would generate an e-mail from the forum and, unfortunately, the mail account I changed to had an automatic acknowledgement message set up which then got treated as a support ticket request at TCH who sent an acknowledgement to the account which had an automated response ........ Sorry if I should have known all of this in advance, but I didn't. I therefore may have unwittingly caused unnecessary work and mail traffic. For 1 above don't know if there's anything you can do to rectify. For 2 above, maybe it's just something others need to be aware of? regards, simplyjond

Mike, had a look at the custom 404 in cPanel and couldn't understand it at all - so rapidly got out of there. I tried putting a blank file called 404.shtml into the root folder, but it didn't stop the error log entries because apparently such a file was required in the public_html folder. So now I've created a blank file called 404.shtml into the public_html folder, as well. The reason I've created blanks, is because I don't know what should go in to such a file. Does anyone have a sample of a 404.shtml file that I could look at please? many thanks simplyjond ?????

Hi All, after yesterday's overnight run updated AWStats, I went in and found the section on errors and there was a 404 listed, blue colored and it was a link. So far so good . So naturally, I thought this was it - I'll find out where it's living and exterminate that pesky 404 rat once and for all . And low and behold, the link tells me that the problem is being caused by......... NEOMAIL!!!! /neo-images/neomail-bg.gif # error hits=78 Gosh, darn-it!!! All that sweat and tears checking out everything I could lay my hands on that I'd written. All that tearing my hair out. Ho hum,. Great life this web site creation, think I'll go back to playing Monopoly - at least I could pretend that I understood the rules of that game. My error log today is telling me that I've got a "404.shtml" file missing. I never refer to that file anywhere on my site. Also I put a one liner into the .htaccess file in the public_html folder and pointed all 404 errors at a specially created page called "404error.html" - so any ideas why I need a "404.shtml" file or where this error is coming from, please? thanks, simplyjond

Hi Turtle, yep, thanks for that. I've followed thru the links and created a 404error page and edited the .htaccess file etc. But since I don't know what was causing the errors, and I wasn't experiencing any problems myself when visiting the site - I don't know if it's having any effect . But I guess I'll just wait and see if the error log stops piling up with messages - that might be some sort of indication!! if only I could eliminate the varmints. thanks all, simplyjond

Hi Mike, thanks for that example. I suppose it's too naive to say I'd like to eliminate the errors as well as have some way of dealing with them? But so far I can't even track down the cause - I know it's not caused by customers visiting the site, because there haven't been any yet!! And, as I said, I haven't experienced any errors when testing the site. thanks, simplyjond

Hi, thanks for that and I've tried what you said. There is no 404 in the AWStats display (blue or not). You're right I don't have a 404.shtml file - don't know what it is, why I need it, what it would look like, and what it would contain? I see I've had search engine crawlers on the site today - could that have any connection with the 404 errors? They also appear to have been looking for a robots.txt file that I don't have either? Should I have one; what is it; what does it look like/contain, etc??? It is dreadful being this ignorant - I hate it Mad!!! Mad!!! Mad!!! thanks for your help, simplyjond

Hi, can any of you experienced webmasters (i.e. longer than a week) help me, please? My site is up and running and as far as I can tell it seems to be operating correctly. There are no missing pages; there are no blanks where graphics should appear; I can navigate successfully to all pages; etc..... Nevertheless, my error log is filling up with 404 error messages. Mainly saying the same thing:- [Mon Sep 1 09:13:16 2003] [error] [client 161.114.64.75] File does not exist: /home/simplyj/public_html/404.shtml This ain't exactly helpful as it doesn't tell me what page or image or link or anything else is causing the error to be logged . I've looked in AWStats in the error section, but that is not giving any useful info either . How can I track down and eliminate these pesky barsteward errors ? Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated Thumbs Up . thanks, simpljond

To all in support, I appreciate you help and assistance - definitely over and above the call of duty - during the last few days. The source of the problem has been seemingly going ping-pong from TCH to others, back and forth, but TCH never gave up or told me to "get lost". It looks like Bill is absolutely right. It has proved impossible to forward mail to autoresponder services - whatever the forwarding process is doing to the mail header is unacceptable to the autoresponder service providers. N.B. this refers to independent autoresponder service providers not to the "out of office" single message type autoresponder that is available thru the cPanel (that works fine). I have re-engineered the mechanisms on my site - mainly using forms now rather than letting people send in e-mails to register. thanks again for all your hard work - sorry to have caused so much trouble thru my ignorance. simplyjond

I seem to be having a problem with e-mail forwarding and don't know how to solve it. If someone can help me I'd really appreciate it. I have set up a number of e-mail accounts and they all seem to be receiving e-mail OK . Some of them have auto-responders set and those function fine as well . So everything was looking fine, until I tried to use forwarding. I've tried forwarding based on e-mail addresses at my domain that do have an account - the incoming e-mail goes to the account, but doesn't get forwarded . I've tried forward for e-mail addresses at my domain that don't have accounts - the incoming mail just disappears into thin air . I've tried specifying the forwarding address using different formats like a@b.com or a+b.com - makes no difference, the incoming e-mail doesn't get forwarded in either case . I've also tried sending e-mails from an outside account directly to the address I want mail forwarded to - and it gets there OK. So I know that mail is coming in properly. I know I can send mail out (e.g. autoresponder). I just can't seem to get any mail to forward via my domain e-mail addresses to my chosen final destination addresses??????? Can anyone shed any light on what I've done wrong, please? thanks, simplyjond