PHP on homepages

[#1]

James_H
I do not want my site to appear as www.domainname.co.uk as Google will drop it out of its listings (see earlier posts).
It must appear as www.username.f9.co.uk and all of its sub-pages must appear are sub-pages of www.username.f9.co.uk.
If you know how to do that on the ccgi platform and run PHP on the site, then please tell me.

[#2]

Quote from: Tony

The ONLY trouble from rogue scripts has been that they can hog the cpu time on the server system.

So if you don't class scripts deleting all the content from thousands of other users as trouble, or spammers using the cgi servers to spew out tons of spam as trouble, what do you class them as?

[#3]

Quote

So if you don't class scripts deleting all the content from thousands of other users as trouble, or spammers using the cgi servers to spew out tons of spam as trouble, what do you class them as?

I would have conceded the second as a possibility, but PN have made it so that after only a few emails from a single PHP source there are increasing delays between sending that makes 'spewing out tons of spam' something that would take years to achieve.
The first is not possible as the PHP scripts can only act within the confines of their own webspace, or someone could do the same on any PHP enabled website - including the ccgi server.

[#4]

Not quite true on the spamming. You can send hundreds of emails from the ccgi servers and your program will finish immediately. The tar pitting happens when the emails you've queued are submitted to the relay server which means that it is a little while before it is noticed - by which time the spammer has long since high-tailed out of there!

[#5]

Quote from: Tony

James_H I do not want my site to appear as www.domainname.co.uk as Google will drop it out of its listings (see earlier posts). It must appear as www.username.f9.co.uk and all of its sub-pages must appear are sub-pages of www.username.f9.co.uk. If you know how to do that on the ccgi platform and run PHP on the site, then please tell me.

Enter the domain name that you want to appear in whatever format you want it to appear.
From an example POV www.domainname.co.uk is no different from servername.subdomain.domainname.co.uk
If you want to use the latter, is there something stopping you from doing so?

[#6]

James_H
Thank you for your suggestion, but I don't think it is possible.
In the section where you point the domain names to the ccgi server space:
Member centre - My account - Domain names
it only offers you the domain names that you already own e.g. mydomain.co.uk
It does allow you to configure your subdomain (username.f9.co.uk).
There is no mechanism for associating your F9 subdomain with a folder on the ccgi server.
If I am looking at the wrong area of the member centre, then please tell me.

[#7]

I think this can be done but has to be requested by raising a ticket to ask for all your webspace to be hosted on ccgi.

[#8]

Hi jelv,
Sadly I do not think that this is the case. I believe I raised a support ticket about this back in 2003 when I first wanted to use PHP with my main site. I was forced to use 'kludges' to circumvent the issue.
Perhaps someone from PN staff could give us a definitive answer and comment on other suggestions in this topic.
Personally I quite like PJ's suggestion that:

Quote from: PJ

Removing webspace from free PAYG accounts is another approach to this problem.

Free accounts are already restricted in many other ways. It would not affect business users that have others managing their web sites and might encourage customers to go for a paid-for solution - more money for PN to spend on email and webspace servers.
No webspace = no need for FTP access = no scripts = no security risk

[#9]

I have raised a ticket to find out whether Jelv's suggestion about

Quote

ask for all your webspace to be hosted on ccgi.

is feasible - they may have had a change of heart since 2003.
Still awaiting any comment from knowledgeable PN staff....

[#10]

Unfortunately that's not possible, the separation between the homepages and ccgi is performed deliberately.

[#11]

To counter the argument about Google indexing your site, you can do the following:
1.  Set up your domain to point to the CGI server
2.  Copy your website from the homepages server to the CGI server and ensure it's all updated and functioning.
3.  Insert an .htaccess file in your homepages webspace containing:

Quote

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

This will force a permanent 301 redirect on your old web address, remapping all old links to your new site.
It will take Google up to 6-8 weeks to update their links to point to your new site.  However, any links that are in their existing index will automatically redirect to your domain immediately.
So, site moved to a domain, no loss of search index position and the ability to run .php files all in one go.
B.

[#12]

... with the enormous advantage that if subsequently you need to move you website to a different hosting provider all the Google links will be pointing to the domain name owned by you and not based on the F9 username.

[#13]

Barry and Jelv,
I did exactly that about 2 years ago using the RewriteEngine and a RewriteRule to do a permanent redirection.
I fell out of Google because the links around the world were all pointing to username.f9.co.uk and not to mydomain.co.uk.
Google realised that the links were not directly pointing to the destination address and ditched my page rank and I went from first to position 100+ in the listings.
I wrote to Google via their contact and surprisingly they replied. They advised undoing the redirection and said that the listing positions would be reestablished when Google spidered again.
It took over a month to get my listing positions back and it cost me over £2000 in lost sales (estimating from previous months).
I am not going down that route again.
I have been trying to do a redirect as suggested by the answer to my ticket. That certainly works, but shows the new address in the browser address bar as http://ccgi.username.force9.co.uk/folder/testfile.php which is useless.
It looks as through Chris is right and they just won't allow it, even though most other ISP do - as I said before, I have 4 sites hosted with Portland.co.uk. I can get FTP access from anywhere, cpanel access, and PHP.
Ah well, time to give up.

[#14]

I'm surprised that Google advised you of that - they actually advised me to use the 301 redirect system to move from one domain to another and it worked very well.
B.

[#15]

OK a variant of Barry's suggestion.
Set up a complete copy of your website using www.domainname.com on ccgi. Leave the existing website in place on homepages (with no fancy redirects).
In the www.username website change all the links to point to the new domainname website. Google will find all the existing pages and so won't remove them - in the meantime more and more people will be using the new website and Google will build up indexing on the new site.
When the changeover is sufficient get rid of the old site.
You could put banners on both sites saying the website address is changing and for people to bookmark the new address.