Well thats sucky.

SkylineObsession

SkylineObsession

Expert daydreamer
Premium
Messages
4,274
New Zealand
New Zealand
Messages
SkylineObsession
Messages
Mangosaurus
Anyone know of any decent free webhosting places which allow you to use a domain name you've paid for?

The Gran Turismo Series Center is down indefinately due to the munted restrictions on the free Netfirms (.com) web hosting plan. And their customer service has never been particulary good, you ask a question via e-mail and they send back copied and pasted generic replies even if it doesn't relate to the question/s. Either that or they completely ignore a question/s which happened in the below e-mail after i asked when they changed it from shutting down the site for 24 hours (for excessive bandwidth usage) to indefinately.

"Thank-you for your e-mail enquiry.

> 4. YOUR bandwidth usage is restricted to 1 gigabyte (GB) per
> month, and no more than 56 MB per day. Excess daily usage may
> result in the disabling of YOUR SITE. Reactivation of YOUR SITE may
> require upgrading of your Web hosting plan;

We will not be able to tell why suddenly there where so many
visitors. But your site was suspended for exceeding daily traffic
limit (used 113MB out of 70MB).

If you have any other questions regarding our hosting services,
please feel free to contact us via phone at 1.866.317.4678, or by
using our Live Sales Chat Service."

Mind you, i'm not a paying customer but it doesn't exactly inspire me to sign up to a paid plan - they may get heaps of e-mails but so what? They provide a service, they should expect to get questions.

Ah well. I'm not after paid hosting plans because a.) I can't afford any yet, and b.) The site hasn't been updated since January and i've got hardly any visitors anymore. I just want to keep it online. :(

I am aware i shouldn't be posting this topic in The Rumble Strip, but some people were wondering what had happened to the site and i thought there might be more people in this forum who can help.
 
Because the website section of the compy forums isn't as populated as this forum is. :| And it is just plain jane HTML text made with a 1995-1997 webpage editor (FrontPage Expres 2.0 :D) which makes it very hard and mundane to update (have to do each page individually :() which is one of the main reasons there has been a lack of updates.
 
I do use FTP (FTP Commander). :)

Unfortunately the GTSC is now permanently offline due to not having a decent place to host it anymore (can't really be bothered going through all the free web hosts anymore). That and the fact that it just took way to long to update (because each page had to be updated individually) and because i was never happy with the design has lead me to this. And it is near impossible to get up to the level the current Gran Turismo websites are at (GranTurismo-Racing.com, GranTurismoX.net, GTPlanet.net etc).

It will still exist, but only on my computer and on CD's/DVD's. Thanks A LOT to all those who've looked at and submitted content for it over the past six years. It may eventually make a comeback, but that could be years away and will only be if it has been professionally redesigned.

:) :| :(
 
The internet just wouldn't be the same without the GTSC - surely there is something you can do. Do you know if your domain name registrar offers domain name redirection? That's basically what I do with gtplanet.org. Namecheap (my registrar) hosts the domain name, and then simply directs traffic to the domain to a web page that I specify. This allows me to keep the domain name independently hosted, while also allowing me to direct the domain name to any URL on the internet. If you used this method, you could switch free web hosts as often as you like and simply update the URL in your domain account.

I don't know if your host offers the service or not, but if not, I recommend NameCheap. You could transfer your domain to them and essentially get a year's worth of hosting for $8.88! I know what it's like to have a site you care about, and I'd love to see yours get back on its feet.
 
:) Thanks a lot for the support and advice Jordan, and you're right - the internet wouldn't be the same without it.

Truthfully i never wanted to take it offline (even though i've asked Netfirms to delete my account) because i suppose it should be on the net even if it hasn't been updated for years (for example). I will try find out if my domain name registrar offers redirection.

To make sure i understand it right, if the new GTSC URL was www.gtsc.google.com (for instance) i could link the www.gtseriescenter.com url to that url and when visitors arrive at the site they will see the www.gtsc.google.com address instead?
 
To make sure i understand it right, if the new GTSC URL was www.gtsc.google.com (for instance) i could link the www.gtseriescenter.com url to that url and when visitors arrive at the site they will see the www.gtsc.google.com address instead?
Click to expand...
That's correct. Namecheap actually just uses a full-page frame to display the URL that you've entered, so it can be easily changed or updated. Of course, you can take a look at gtplanet.org to see exactly how it all works out. I've been doing it for a while now, so let me know if you have any problems or questions with it.
 
This is the one you need to read

Basically, it says that you can choose where the actual pages are that are shown to the user when they enter your domain name. So you can have "www.mydomain.com" pointing to "cheapowebsitesrus.com/mustangmanspages".

The choice to "cloak" or not determines whether the user's browser shows "www.mydomain.com" or "cheapowebsitesrus.com/mustangmanspages" in the address field. The former looks better, but probably breaks within-site bookmarks. You would also need to check that directory redirection is handled correctly. As in: does "www.mydomain.com/mydirectory" successfully redirect to "cheapowebsitesrus.com/mustangmanspages/mydirectory".

If your site's down at the minute, it's probably a good time to muck about with the settings now.

And if you're doing 100MB per day you need a professional host. You should be able to recover your hosting fees using the Google AdSense program.

And if your pages are written in FrontPage, you're probably wasting double your bandwidth. Get it recoded in XHTML/CSS you bad boy!!! There are several free text editors that will help you with syntax colouring and stuff.
 
I use Bravenet for My Pet groups home page. it's pretty simple to use, and you can create some nice pages pretty easy.my moms web page is on there too, i believe it allows to switch domain names that you've paid for. Hope This Helps.

From,
Wall51
 
How much disk space do you need / use?

I have a server which I could throw you on for free, assuming you don't use too much space (bandwidth is plentiful, but disk space is not quite as much). It would at least be good for now.

Let me know.
 
GilesGuthrie
This is the one you need to readThe choice to "cloak" or not determines whether the user's browser shows "www.mydomain.com" or "cheapowebsitesrus.com/mustangmanspages" in the address field. The former looks better, but probably breaks within-site bookmarks. You would also need to check that directory redirection is handled correctly. As in: does "www.mydomain.com/mydirectory" successfully redirect to "cheapowebsitesrus.com/mustangmanspages/mydirectory".
Click to expand...

I think the only reason for not cloaking would be if the URL in question is a truly alternate name. I.e. you want people to be able to use the alternate as a way to find the "preferred" name.

I think the service works by sort of "tunneling" the http to the real server; that is, as a type of proxy. I can't see how it would cause problems with regular URL directory access. Well, they may or may not be set up to properly send top-level URLs into a "sub-directory" as you describe. But, really, that does sound both a fundamental thing to provide and an easy thing to do. (Though it will cause problems if there are any pre-existing root-relative links). I don't know enough about http to really speculate on how cookies and stuff are redirected like that. I would guess the vBulletin CGI is unable to obtain information about the connecting IP address, etc, unless those are forwarded somehow via the tunneled http.

Okay, so another reason for not cloaking would be if some CGI software didn't work.

But, in general, the actual location of the server "today" wants to be a secret. You want to bookmark https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/search.php not a URL using whatever the genuine host server happens to be today. Similarly, internal links should either be absolute using https://www.gtplanet.net/ or relative or root-relative. The browser computes the absolute URL from relative or root-relative references and would contact the "proxy" ("www.gtplanet.net") but that will do the appropriate tunneling, and so everything will work. Putting links in to the server-du-jour should work (well, except that one might be configured the actual server to refuse most connections not from the proxy service) but would be inadvisable since the idea is to be able to change the actual server transparently.

IIUC YMMV EGBDF etc.
 
Holey moley, i'm getting quite confused. :scared:

Well, i've had another account at Netfirms for a while, www.gtsc2.netfirms.com, and i today uploaded the whole site to that (site only takes up 7.45 mb on the computer, pictures etc inclusive) and transferred over the domain name (could take up to four days to go through though).

I've decided to keep using them, as although their customer service stinks in a way the whole thing is overly familar and it is very reliable. I will likely be reducing the number of images on the site by a fair bit though to hopefully try help bandwidth, the GT4 screenshots page which made its return on the latest design is now gone again. :(

I will NEVER be resorting to Google ads sorry as they honestly completely mess up websites to me and i tend to be put off the site in question because of them. They are just really tacky even though you can customise them and they probably bring in money. Something i feel quite strongly about, i really don't like websites with ads which is why i'll be uprading to Premium here whenever i can afford to (there is a one time payment which lasts forever is there not?). I may end up getting a paid plan on Netfirms, maybe Dad can help out seen as he lives in the USA.

And i'm looking for GT affilliates to put up on the links sidebar on the main page. Racing-line (link to my site doesn't work?), GranTurismo-Racing.com (gone?) and GT4 Photo Travel forums (gone also?) all seem to be gone/dead/abandoned so i have nothing left to link on that side anymore. I'd link GTPlanet and GTX if they included sections with links to other GT sites. Hoping to get some affilliates before the next update which i'll be starting on soon.
 
I use GoDaddy.com for everything: Pay about US$60 a year althogether for my domain, 500MB of space, a good bit of bandwidth...no downtime yet, decent customer service (although calling Arizona from New Zealand can't be cheap). It's called their Economy Hosting plan; also has FTP, MySql, loads of other applications to use, stats, etc.

Surely there's some bargain hosting plans in NZ, It doesn't sound as if you need anything that complicated. It's also nice to have a little site of your own for whatever you want, with your own rules, etc.
 

Latest Posts

Back