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The site I set up in 2005 has never used a large amount of bandwidth. However, an annual fee of $10 is not excessive and I would like to keep the site as it receives a steady stream of traffic from search engines. A tiered approach seem like fair compromise.

When I reported connection problems early in July it turned out to be a prelude to a Denial of Service attack. Around 23:00 GMT last night the same thing happened again. There were serious connection problems affecting my site, FTP this forum. Sometimes the pages would start to load and then timeout. At other times I got a "Could not connect to remote server" error message. My site doesn't use a database. Just now, it took a long time for the forum to load.

Hi looie,
Newcomers to FreePgs might not realize it, but this has been happening on-and-off since 2005. There are quite a few earlier posts about it on the forum. Often, the connection problems occur when USA citizens are asleep in bed. At one time I was thinking of purchasing a second account to install a WordPress blog, but because of the intermittent downtimes I set up a blog at Wordpress.com instead.

On Tuesday July 03, 2007, at around 10pm GMT, several FreePgs sites were intermittently throwing up "Cannot connect" errors, not just mine. When I tried to access the forum, the page started to load and then timed out. Then things appeared to be back to normal for a few days. On Sunday July 08, 2007, at around 8am GMT, it wasn't possible to connect to the forum or any FreePgs sites, although I could access other US sites without difficulty.

I'm wary now of recommending FreePgs plans to friends. I wonder if the connection problems might cause pages to be dropped by search engines.

[Dans34]

Dans34 > ...so prohaps it is the users connection ?

No. Because it's not happening with other sites I visit at the same time.

[brainiac744]

brainiac744 > I'm not having any problem loading pages

You've made unhelpful responses like that before. If it's not happening when when you try to access a page, why bother to reply? You're not helping anyone who is experiencing the problem. It's an intermittent problem, by the way.

Pageloads are desperately slow at the moment. The forum loads slowly too. I'm wondering if this is a time-of-day problem. Maybe there's someone who deliberately chooses to overload the server while USA citizens are asleep in bed. I hoped this sort of problem would come to an end once free accounts were removed.

Yes, SlimStat uses IP addresses. I removed the include statement for SlimStat and the pages load much faster, so I think it may have been a MySQL issue.

For a very long time I've been using www.StatCounter.com to track visitors to my site. About a week ago I uploaded SlimStat because it records search engine crawlers. StatCounter fetches a JavaScript file from an external server, while SlimStat uses PHP and MySQL on the FreePgs "mysql5.freepgs.com" server.

Over the one week period, StatCounter consistently recorded more Unique Visitors and Page Views. As I said in another post a while ago, if FreePgs enabled SQLite support in PHP5 it would free us from reliance on an overloaded MySQL server. The new phpBB3 forum software can use SQLite.

The response time has been painfully slow for the past few hours. One page request timed out. I don't know if this is a problem only for users in Europe.

I though it would be interesting to try out a wiki package for the first time. I did some research and then posted a short summary to the forum's user-blog:

http://forum.freepgs.com/index.php?action=viewblog;u=553;id=4

Basic knowledge of PHP is necessary to customize most scripts -- unless the standard configuration is all you need. Usually only the best-known products have comprehensive documentation covering installation. It helps if you can test things out before you upload them to your site. For that you'll need a server installation kit on your PC (Apache, MySQL & PHP). There are many to choose from, but in my opinion WAMP5 is easiest for a newbie and runs on Windows_XP:

http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Version 1.4.4 of WAMP5, which is still available for download, incorporates:

MySQL 4.1.20
Apache 1.3.33
PHP 5.0.4

It doesn't matter that the Apache version is different to FreePgs. The important thing is that the PHP/MySQL versions are the same.

I haven't tried setting up a wiki, but here's a link for MediaWiki, which is used by Wikipedia:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation

EDIT: Just to clarify, FreePgs uses PHP 5.0.4 and MySQL_5, while MediaWiki can use either MySQL_4 or MySQL_5.

Thanks. I was thinking about setting up a CMS unrelated to the present content of the site. Just an idea at present -- I need to prepare more articles.

I have a FreePgs Gold account, but I haven't purchased a domain name. Is it possible to set up a second subdomain?

My situation is that I have a single subdomain at freepgs.com. I haven't purchased a domain name.

The FreePgs system only provides 2 subdomains on all accounts.

At present, connecting via FTP takes me straight to the root directory of my subdomain. I was wondering what the FTP path would look like if I requested a second Freepgs subdomain. Or is it only available if I purchase a domain name?