TrainWeb.org Free Web Hosting
Frequently Asked Questions
Sign up
for free web hosting and become a member of the largest railroad community on the web. Currently there are over
800 web sites hosted on the web servers of TrainWeb. There are over
444,000 page visits to TrainWeb every month by more than
200,000 train enthusiasts, or over
5 million page visits per year!.
We are the busiest railroad community on the web.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)
Below are some of the common questions that we receive from our members.
If you have a question that is not covered here, then just send us an
email.
TrainWeb.org is a community of railroad websites hosted free on a
TrainWeb server.
TrainWeb has been providing FREE web hosting since 1996 to organizations and individuals that
offer railroad related information and photographs for the enjoyment and education of the
public.
Your web address will be like this : http://www.trainweb.org/membername.
Where membername is the account name requested by you in the sign up process and
that has been assigned to you by TrainWeb. For short, visitors can also just type TrainWeb.org/membername
into their web browser.
YES, as long as your domain registrar allows URL forwarding. In simple words,
we will create an account for you with http://www.trainweb.org/membername
and all you will have to do is use the domain name forwarding feature which is generally
provided by your domain registrar to this account.
Click here for further details.
YES. Banner ads will be automatically inserted at the top and bottom of each page of your website.
These banner ads will look similar to the ones you see at the top and bottom of this page.
We NEVER use pop-up ads or any types of ads that cover the content of your own web pages.
If you do see our page headers or page trailers overwriting your content, it is probably because you are using
ABSOLUTE ADDRESSING in your web page design. Please DO NOT USE ABSOLUTE ADDRESSING in your web page design.
Our web server automatically serves the TrainWeb page header and then serves your web page. Once your web page has finished
being served to the web visitor, our web server then automatically serves the TrainWeb page footer. If you use
Absolute Addressing, then your page will get meshed with the automatic TrainWeb headers and footers. Stay away from
Absolute Addressing when designing your web pages and you will not have a problem.
Most of the ads that you will see on your web pages are automatically inserted by Google AdWords and should be appropriate
for all ages to view.
Note that Google automatically serves ads based on the web browsing behavior of the web site viewers, not based on the
content of the web site. For example, if a visitor to your web pages also visits a lot of websites related to car racing,
then he is likely to see a lot of ads related to automobiles.
TrainWeb also does direct sales of advertising mostly to railroad related vendors.
If you see a railroad related ad, that is likely from a sponsor directly obtained by TrainWeb.
Our sponsors provide the financial support to make TrainWeb possible. Without their financial support, TrainWeb would not exist
and we would not be able to provide you with free web hosting. In the 20 years since TrainWeb has been in existence, the
revenue from advertising on TrainWeb has only covered the web hosting and operations of TrainWeb. That revenue has never
been used to return a profit or pay a salary to its owners.
We do not charge for hosting your website at TrainWeb. We never have and never will.
You are already donating your time and knowledge to the railroad community, so we don't expect
you to donate your money as well. We feel that you are already doing enough just by contributing
your website. Unlike some providers that charge to access their premium areas in order to fund
their web hosting services, TrainWeb does not charge to access ANY area, not even our premium sections.
NO. The number one requirement of being hosted at TrainWeb.org is that your
website must be related to rail. If you have a few web pages at your website
that are not directly related to rail, that does not give us a problem.
But, it has to be obvious to visitors to your website that it is a rail related website.
NO. TrainWeb reserves the exclusive right to place advertising on web pages hosted on our
web servers. However, we do not have a problem if you are a club or other non-profit organization and offer some
items, services or tickets to events for sale to support your organization.
NO. TrainWeb does not offer email accounts.
However, if you would like email forwarding from membername@trainweb.org to your current email address,
that can be provided.
If you obtain and forward your own domain name to your www.trainweb.org account, your domain
name registrar will usually be able to provide e-mail forwarding from your own domain name.
Click here for further details.
Can I upload movie and sound files?
Sound and movie files take up a lot more bandwidth so we ask webmasters to
keep these features to a minimum. It may be better to create and upload your video to a YouTube.com
account and then link or embed those videos on your website hosted at TrainWeb.
Click here to send us an
email and we will send your password. Please do not forget to mention your website name.
We are in the process of writing a new lost password program which will significantly reduce
time in retrieving your password.
You can upload and download files to your website hosted on the TrainWeb.org server using FTP.
For more information on
how to obtain free FTP software and how to use it, click here.
FTP softare is avilable for both PC and MAC systems.
Your account was created with an inital disk quota of 100 megabytes. Additional disk
space is granted as requested as long as it is for the upload of additional web pages
and photos of interest to the rail community. Click here
for more information on how to request addtional disk space.
NO. The TrainWeb server does not allow Server Side Includes(SSI), CGI/PHP scripting. To process forms, run forums, page counters,
or provide other services to your visitors, please consider using similar free services
that can be found elsewhere on the web.
Occasionally we are asked if TrainWeb supports the Microsoft Front Page Extensions. The answer is "yes" and "no".
TrainWeb does not endorse the use of any HTML features that violate the current standards as promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Click here for more details.
NO. Your website will not display properly if you use frames. The TrainWeb headers and footers will automatically get inserted
into every frame of your website and it will look like a mess. You can use inline frames ("iframe"). Those should not cause
any problems.
An automatic backup of our web servers is made regularly. However,
TrainWeb does not make any guarantee that a recent copy of any part of your website can
be recovered from these backups. The primary responsibility for having a backup copy
of your website rests with you. You should always keep a copy of every file of your website
on your own computer. If necessary, you should be able to recover your entire website by re-uploading
every file from your backup copy on your own computer. If you accidentally delete an individual file from
your website, we CAN NOT recover the deleted file for you from our backup. The effort to locate and
recover one particular file from our backup is too time consuming for our small staff.
The purpose of our automatic web server backup is to recover from a complete web server failure,
and not to recover individual accounts or files.
TrainWeb does not have ANY telephone support staff.
The only way you can communicate with our
technical people is by e-mail.
Your e-mail will go into a queue and will be answered as soon as we get a chance, which may sometimes take day or two.
If the topic is urgent, such as a notification to us that our web server is down, it will be handled quickly.
The only topics that our technical people will deal with are reports that there is something wrong with our server or
something wrong with your web account.
We do not provide any technical support related to questions of how to create or modify web pages. Other than directing
you to a page that explains how to upload files
to your web account, we do not provide help with uploading
files to your website. If you need any help with these basic issues, you should consult with an experienced webmaster
that can help you through this learning curve. We'd like to help you in this area,
but our small staff just does not have the time available.
Our network is very reliable so we are rarely ever down. We have better than 99.9% uptime.
We are only aware of one major web server failure over more than 20 years that TrainWeb has existed.
