Posted by softwarelabus on 08/08/06 18:31

Big Bill wrote:
> On 8 Aug 2006 07:16:01 -0700, softwarelabus@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> >Hi,
> >
> >I wanted to warn all website owners that some evil web hosts like
> >vistapages will periodically place a robots.txt file on your site that
> >disallows all search engines. It happened to me.
> >
> >Over the last several months I've noticed my web traffic dropped to
> >nearly zero. A few days ago I noticed a new file, robots.txt. As most
> >of you know, if your site has a robots.txt in your websites home
> >directory then all search engines will look at it for possible
> >instructions. The robots.txt file tells search engines what to do or
> >what not to do. In my case, it had simple instructions to disallow all
> >user-agents; i.e., telling all sites they cannot come here.
> >
> >How to check:
> >If you web site is called www.mywebsite.com then you want to check the
> >following web page:
> >www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt
> >
> >You should also look for this file when you ftp to your site in case
> >your web host places a sneaky server script to make robots.txt
> >invisible only to you.
> >
> >Paul
>
> I guess your web hosts don't like you, do they? Did you ask them about
> this?
>
> BB


BB, I had several domains with vistapages, but only switched one domain
so far. It was a very important domain-- business related.

As far as contacting vistapages, I can't bear yet another conversation
with them. And call me cheap for not yet switching all my domains to
another host because they still have my money and laugh whenever I ask
for a partial refund.

BTW, so far I've had good luck with bethehost.com-- knock on wood.
Except they've been under severe attacks from a hacker this week and
had to take the entire server down for about 4 hours. I still give
them an A grade. They always email everyone with server updates, etc.
As for vistapages, I can't recall a single informative email from them.

Anyhow, I would appreciate other web host recommendations.

Paul

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