- What is TrainWeb.org?
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.
- Why should I choose TrainWeb.org?
See: TrainWeb.org Member Advantages on the main page of TrainWeb.org.
In addition, TrainWeb will drive visitor traffic to your website by having your click-through banner appear thousands of times per month to the extensive number of visitors to TrainWeb.
Click here to find out why TrainWeb gets more visitors than almost any other rail related website.
TrainWeb provides a report that allows you to see how many times your banner is viewed and how many visitors clicked-through to your website each month.
Click here to see just how many visitors come to TrainWeb.
- How do I sign up?
Visit sign up page and just follow the instructions.
- What is my web address?
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.
- How long does it take to set up my new account?
Usually it takes anywhere between 3 and 5 days. Once your account is created, you will receive an e-mail containing your access codes.
- Can I use my own domain name?
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 forwarding feature which is generally
provided by your domain registrar to this account. Click here for further details.
- Will you be placing any advertising on my site?
YES. A banner ad will be automatically inserted at the top of each page of your website. Please note that all of our banner advertisements are rail related. We never use
distasteful tactics, such as advertising pop-ups, or frames. 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. Click here for
further details.
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.
Last but not least, we will also promote your banner ad on most of the TrainWeb.com and some of our associated sites. But don't take our word for it - see for yourself!.
Goto TrainWeb.com where member banners are shown on the right side of the RailCams box ad at the top of the page. Your clickable
banner ad will take its turn with other member sites in ad rotation. Please note that we are planning to do a complete re-design of the TrainWeb.com website sometime in the month
of Jan. 2005. Location of member banners might be changed in the new layout. Meanwhile, it will be displayed on the right side of the RailCams box ad.
- Do you host non-rail related web sites?
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.
- Can I offer commercial advertising on my site?
NO. The second most important requirement is that your site must be non-commercial. That is, the purpose of
your website can not be to sell products or services for a profit. However, we do not have a problem if you
participate to a limited degree in affiliate sales programs like that offered by Amazon.com
- Do I get POP3 email account?
NO. TrainWeb does not offer POP3 mailbox service. TrainWeb can provide you
with web based e-mail through RRmail.com. You can select any available name
that you wish and your e-mail address will be yourname@RRmail.com.
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. This service may be phased out in future.
- Lost my password?
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.
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- How do I transfer/upload files to my site?
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.
- How do I request additional disk space?
Your account was created with an inital disk quota of 25 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.
- Does TrainWeb allow SSI, CGI/PHP scripting?
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
provided by www.bravenet.com.
- Do you support MS FrontPage Extensions?
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.
- Do I get access to MySQL databse?
NO. We do not offer access to MySQL or any other kind of databases.
- Can I use frames in my HTML pages?
NO. We suggest that you do not use frames in the design your website. If your
website uses frames, please convert your website to a non-frame website. After
the TrainWeb.org web server changes are implemented, the display of your web
pages may have serious problems if they contain frames.
- Do you offer telnet or shell access?
NO. Trainweb does not allow telnet or shell access to the server.
- Does TrainWeb do a system backup?
TrainWeb does make a backup copy of the servers onto tape on a regular basis. However,
TrainWeb does not make any guarantee that a recent copy of any part of your website can
be recovered from these backup tapes. 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 tape. The effort to locate and
recover one particular file from our tapes is too time consuming for our small staff.
- Do you offer 24/7 technical support?
TrainWeb does not have a telephone support staff available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Actually, we don't have any staff assigned to telephone support! 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 when we get a chance, which may take a few days. 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.
- Do you offer dial-up Internet access accounts?
NO. TrainWeb does not provide dial-up internet access.
- What about server uptime?
Our network is very reliable so we are rarely down. We are also planning to move our servers to a new
web hosting service provider who guarantees 99.9% uptime. We will be moving TrainWeb.org server in the month of Jan, 2005.
Many large commercial web hosting companies have "hot" backup servers and mirrors. A major hardware or software failure on one of their servers might only bring your
website down for minutes or hours. We don't have the luxury of having redundant equipment. Fortunately, there has been very little downtime on any of our servers.
However, we did have a hard disk corruption in September of 2001 and it took 5 days for us to restore our web server. Thus, all the websites hosted on that server
were down for 5 days. We expect our servers to continue to remain quite reliable, but if you could not tollerate your website being down for a number of days
(Please note after the server move in Jan 2005, you don't have to worry about down-time since our ISP guarantees 99.9% uptime) the event of a major system failure,
then you would be better off having your website hosted at a major web hosting facility rather than at TrainWeb. Click here for alternative hosting options.
- Does TrainWeb provide page counters?
No, TrainWeb does not provide page counters. Please consider using one of the many free services that provide page counters
such as www.fastcounter.com or www.bravenet.com.
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