surf chick

I see in your terms of service a requirement that index pages must have a minimum of 500 chars. If I sign up for a reseller account, does that apply only to my own domain or do all subsequent accounts I set up each need that 500 character minimum on each home page?

Website Rob

It applies to any and all Hosting accounts provided through Potent Products.

There is some leeway here as it will eventually be changed to 100 characters -- not words, mind you, but letters of the Alphabet. As we provide Hosting accounts for people, it is natural for a Hosting account to have an Index page, no?

It is agreed that Hosting accounts are for the use of the Individual or Company and as such, can be designed according to their needs. As a Hosting company, we have certain needs as well -- with one being that it is rude and inconsiderate to site Visitors to not provide an Index page. Not having an Index page that actually says something, should always be avoided.

http://hostherenow.com/ is an example of the default Index page. The "Hosted by" is changed to match the Reseller Domain name.


When any Hosting account is setup, it includes certain files that are required by every account. The setup for Resellers provides for automatic creation of these required files, every time the Reseller sets up a sub-account. There is no reason why every account should not have the required files.

At this time, the following is an example of what is included in a every "Welcome" eMail, sent out by Potent Products.


REQUIRED FILES

The following are setup within your account and must remain at
all times. Also applies to every sub-account created.

Server Error Pages
There are 5 'shtml' Error pages which are generic. As these tell
the Server what to do when the 5 most common Web site errors
occur, they must be available to the Server. The current ones are
blank, but you can customize them to match your site Web pages,
by using:

Cpanel > Site Management > Custom Error Pages


Robots File
The "robots.txt" file is for Search Engine Bots which will visit
your Web site, regardless of whether you asked them to or not. It
tells the Bots, what files or directories you want them -- or
don't want them -- to list in their Database. Also has other uses
and you can find more at:

The Web Robots Pages
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html


Favicon Image
The "favicon.ico" is is an image called for by most Browsers in
use today. Nothing anyone can do about it except to provide one,
even if it is a blank image -- which it is in this case. For more
information you can visit:

http://www.favicon.com


** Note: Although these required files must be available, they
can be redirected to another part of your hosting account and/or
you can change the file names of the "shtml" pages, as long as
said redirection or file name change does not create errors --
because that is what we are trying to avoid. Removal or changes
to any of these required files that create errors will cause
disruption to your Service and possibly, Suspension or even
Termination, if removed too many times or too many errors occur.

__________________
The caring is in the sharing. The learning is in the doing.

surf chick

Natural, yes. But that's only an opinion - which I happen to agree with.


Depends on your opinion. People who don't want an index page will be able to give reasons why it should not be a requirement.

My problem is that although I would be happy to follow your TOS, I don't want to impose the same restriction on my clients. And in fact one thought I had would be to put up an index page automatically for any account hosted - but if the client wanted to remove it and not replace it, fair enough.

surf chick

I have just done an index page for someone wanting to set up a design company. All they want is a logo and a contact email - and a short sentence about the company. For the time being. Much less than 500 characters total, and probably less than 100 characters (I didn't check).

So according to TOS, that's not allowed - and I would get told to change it or change hosts? But would something like that be acceptable since in principle the point you're making about index pages is satisfied?

Website Rob

That, BTW, is 103 characters. To give one an idea of how short 100 characters is.

An index page similar to the one you mention for a Design client would be acceptable: there is an index page, it does say something and it shows a valid eMail address -- which I hope, is using ASCII code for the @ sign, so Spam bots don't grab it.

For more information on the common ASCII codes:
http://potentproducts.com/resources/tools/charts.html

__________________
The caring is in the sharing. The learning is in the doing.

Unregistered

Actually, the whole thing is a .jpg image (I saved a screen shot of the page they sent me and formatted the way they wanted it) in a 1x1 table to center it. So email is unreadable by spambots yes? I removed the mailto link also anyway.

I should have mentioned that before since I suppose one could say it's zero characters then, sort of. But I think I understand from your reply that you wouldn't have a problem with it anyway?

Thanks for the ASCII code tip for email addresses. Don't quite get why that prevents spam bots from harvesting email addresses - won't they just pick up the ASCII code from the HTML, or the @ sign in the mailto link that you add? I don't know much about spambots though.

Resource pages look good, hadn't seen them before.

Website Rob

An index page that only has an image and that image has some text (dare I say how much? ) and a valid eMail address, then that would be acceptable.

Currently, over 98% of our Clients and Reseller Clients, have actual working index pages -- as it should be. At some point it might be changed to mantory index page with text and all the other good stuff. The idea being that Potent Products wants to provide Web Hosting accounts to people that want Web Hosting accounts.

People that only desire an account for eMail purposes should look elsewhere for those type services. Providing eMail only accounts is not a Market Potent Products wants to get into. It is hoped that our Resellers feel the same way as well.

__________________
The caring is in the sharing. The learning is in the doing.