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Rochelle
A few days ago I wrote about how I killed this blog. The way I killed it was by choosing an option in my hosting account’s cPanel. My intention was good, as I thought I’d protect my sites from people stealing my bandwidth, but the result of this action was disastrous. I just didn’t know how disastrous until now, and I found it totally by accident. Fortunately for me, I found this out today and not a month from now.
Here’s what happened: Earlier today I got an email from someone responding to a USFreeads ad I have listed. When I answer questions I like to include a link to whatever page in my niche store is relevant to the person’s question. So, I went to my niche store (no problem yet) and clicked on a store page. Enter problem.
My site’s ‘Home’ page is fine. But when I clicked on a store page I was taken to a 400 error message. I didn’t know what this message means (still don’t, nor do I care to know) other than people aren’t able to go anywhere in this site.
Slightly panicked, I checked another one of my niche stores. Same problem. All looked well on the ‘Home’ page but none of the links worked.
This was the same problem I had with this blog after I killed it. I wondered if the problem was in the .htaccess file so I looked at it. Nothing stood out, but I’m not very skilled at reading .htaccess codes so this didn’t mean much.
I had no idea what to do to fix this problem, since the .htaccess file for this blog is very different than my niche stores. Figuring I couldn’t do any more damage than I’d already done, I copied the .htaccess code from my most recent Build A Niche Store download and replaced the code on my niche store with the copied code. It worked! My site was back and ready for visitors.
The reason I am writing this post is to share this experience with you. I knew I had done damage two days ago. At that time I checked each site by looking at each site’s ‘Home’ page. It didn’t occur to me to click links.
So, I highly recommend you check your sites every so often. But don’t just look at them. Click links. Make sure your sites are working the way you intend them to.
Had I not received an email for a USFreeads ad today I might not have realized my sites were basically down for who knows how long? (shudder…)
Checking your sites is a good idea even if you haven’t been playing with settings in your cPanel. Hackers may have attacked your sites and you won’t know unless someone tells you or you check your sites.
Rochelle
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Naughty girl…
Whenever you make ANY changes to a site, click around, check links, go to other pages and do the same. As Rochelle found out, a small molehill can result in an almighty mountain.
In this particular case I didn’t make any changes to any of my sites. I simply pressed a button in cPanel that had dire consequences to every one of my sites.
So how do you get rid of 404 messages? In cpanel sometimes some of my sites have those listed, but I’ve never encountered one when checking my sites.
Alice
A 404 message means a page wasn’t found. The best way to get rid of this is to figure out what page isn’t being found by visitors and redirect it.
While I can’t say for sure what page (or pages) is generating this error, I can say it will occur if you change a link URL name or location of a page. You might go to a search engine, such as Google, and enter site:yourURL.com (using your URL, of course) and see if any of the indexed pages result in a 404 error message.
If someone knows an easier way please share.
Rochelle
404 errors can be triggered if someone is trying to find an old page which they had bookmarked; also by creeps trying to test to see if there is a “back door” page into your web site. There can be loads of reasons for the 404 error page …
If you’re running a BANS site, I think that BANS sends you to a custom 404 page which still shows your site’s navigation - so people are kept onsite and can find something else to browse. It’s a good idea for sites not using BANS scripts to customise the 404 and other error pages, to either monetise them with adsense or put links back to other useful information on your web site. You can do this from within cPanel. However, like Rochelle says, check links and make sure everything is working correctly after you make changes like this.
Margaret
Margarets last blog post..Madonna, 2 Tickets, Oakland, Good Seats, Sat 11/1/08
I forgot to mention in my post that every one of my sites (40+) were down because of what I did. Luckily it took me about an hour to fix them all.
Rochelle