Hello all,
I’ve been hosting with Ipower for sometime and whenever I try to do something “new”, it fails due to the lack of support by their server.
Issue 1: I made a custom CMS (php+mysql) and for SEO purpose, I need to make the title of posts appear in the url. I was planning to do a multilingual site (English + some Devanagari scripts).
Thus, my urls may be like , say http://mysite.com/हिन्दी or http://mysite.com/தமிழ். This works well on my local machine and at one my other shared server (and even at freehostia!) - means, if the url is “present”, it’ll show the page and otherwise the CMS can easily show a neat 404 message.
But, when I test it at Ipower, I get
400 Bad request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
I made a ticket regarding this issue and their response was even strange!
I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. Unfortunately, due to security purposes, we do not allow the characters used in the url for the unicode page. You will need to update the url for the unicode page so that it reflects English characters and it will work fine. Let us know if you have further questions or concerns.
Is there any security risk in using non-English characters in url?
Issue 2
For the above CMS, I need to redirect all incoming request to a server to the index.php file in the root directory. Thus, there’ll be a set of allowed urls defined in the index.php and it’ll show the contents, if present or will throw a neat 404 error along with a header(404) response.
So, a very simplified form of my htaccess and index.php file would be
RewriteEngine On
Options -Indexes
#To redirect all request to index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=$1 [L]
<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
?>
<html >
<head>
<title>Title</title>
</head>
<body >
<h1>
Header
</h1>
<h2>
Footer
</h2>
</body>
</html>
This also works well on my local machine and on a different server. However it fails at Ipower.
Say, when I request http://mysite.com/foo, I get
Header
Footer
(as expected), but when I access http://mysite.com/index.php or http://mysite.com/foo.php , I get
Header
Footer
Not Found
The requested URL /index.php was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Additionally, if I add an ErrorDocument 404 error.htm at the end of my htaccess, I get
Header
Footer
error.htm
for both for both http://mysite.com/index.php and http://mysite.com/foo.php
Here’s their funny reply to the above issue
While your site is loading errors in FireFox, it does not in Internet Explorer. This is a browser compatibility issue brought on by your sites coding. As we do not support scripting of any kind, we will have to ask you to address these issues from your end. Below is a forum that may provide useful information. Let us know if you have further questions or concerns.
PHP header(“HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found”); PHP Server Side Scripting forum at WebmasterWorld
If anybody have an account at Ipower, I request to confirm that these errors are not only for me.
Thanks for reading.