Bad Web Hosts

If your web hosts moan about anything like being asked to fix the canonical problem, get new web hosts.

Hosting a web site used to be an easy gig. You had the back end company that actually owned the servers and did the work. You were simply the reseller, you sold on the service and put your markup on top of it. You yourself had no actual responsibilities, if any problems came along you just passed them on to your technical department, AKA the actual hosting company.

Well, then was then and now is now and it's just not like that any more.

These days, as the commercial potential of owning a successful web site is becoming more widely understood, site owners are getting a great deal more aware of the problems typically found with free and cheap web hosts and avoiding them as a consequence. Is Google, or are any of the engines, in fact, likely to take your business site seriously and rank it well when it's on a free hosting site like Geocities? Since you aren't showing any evidence of any commitment, why should they bother to include your site in their index? Probably it just won't happen. Google these days may well take an active interest in who you're hosted with and, some say, how long you're registered with them for. Google need to know who they should be taking seriously and just can't trust their algorithm to tell them, runs the theory.

Oh yes, the canonical problem - how can you address it? Well, assuming you have an .htaccess file and you can access it, then you might try this;

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

once you've tweaked it appropriately of course. No guarantees, mind, at your own risk etc. But it does work for me.

If you're one of the unfortunates still bound to Windows hosting then I'm told an answer to your troubles may be found here:

301 redirect for Windows servers.

There's a broader and more serious problem with bad web hosting though. Badly configured servers, especially mail servers, are vulnerable to attack from spammers and hijackers. They make it possible for the spread of spam and contribute to the overall ill-health of the web as a whole.

So overall, hosting a web site is these days a job for professionals, and you can't get away any more with just being a part-time bad web host!