A broken link means the server can’t find the page you’ve designated in your link. The two most common causes of this error are:

 

–The most common cause of broken links is case sensitivity issues. Our servers are case sensitive. That means that when they look at text an upper case letter and a lower case letter are two different characters. To our server a and A are two different things. So, if your filename is MyPage.html and you created your hyperlink to refer to mypage.html the server won’t find it. Check the values in your links against your page names to be sure the case matches. You may want to get in the habit of naming your pages in all lower case all the time. Then you know what to use when you specify your links.

Along the same line an error can be caused by spaces or other characters in your page names. The explanation is long and complicated, but your best habit is to replace spaces with underscores _ and to only use letters and numbers in your filenames.

 

–The file is in a directory inside of your web space and you didn’t designate the directory when you created the link. Let’s say you had a help area on your website where you stored help files for your site visitors. And you created a directory named help to keep the help files organized and not mixed in with your other site files. And let’s say you have a file in your help area called….oh, basic_help.html. If you are on the main page of your site and you want to create a link directly to basic_help.html you would need to name the link /help/basic_help.html. If you just name the link basic_help.html the server will look for the file in your httpdocs folder where your index.html page is and not find it there. BUT, and this is where it gets tricky….Let’s say that inside of the help folder you had a file named main.html. If you were editing this page and you wanted to create a link to basic_help.html you would just put basic_help.html in the link. Why? Because main.html is already inside of the help folder. So when someone clicks a link from main.html the server will start looking within the directory where main.html lives, which is the help directory.

Ahh, likely a common mistake. There are two primary causes of this problem.

1) Pictures are displayed in a web page by using a reference within the code telling the web browser where that picture “lives”. The problem may be that these references are wrong. Often when the site is built on your personal PC and you create references to pictures you create references to the pictures in various folders around your PC.  To see if this is the problem, open your web page in your web browser. Hover your mouse pointer over one of the red X’s and right click. Choose properties from the menu that appears.

In the Properties window that appears look at the Address: (URL) line. This tells you where the web page is looking for the image. If this address says something like C:/something then the reference is set to the image on your hard drive. Correct this by going into the coding for your web page and putting the correct reference.
For example, if you have a directory inside of httpdocs called images or pics where you store all your graphics the reference would be /images/picturename.filetype. If your images are just inside of httpdocs the reference would just be picturename.filetype.

 

2) The second common mistake is in naming the files and references. Unix servers are case sensitive. This means that to the server picture.jpg and Picture.jpg are not the same file. In the properties window, check the case of the filename in your reference. Then compare that to the reference in your page code. If one uses capitals and one doesn’t that is the problem. Adjust one or the other so that they match and re-upload the affected pages.

This error means that you are not in the right upload directory. Make sure that you have opened (or designated as initial upload directory) the httpdocs directory and are uploading there.

The only exception would be cgi files which should be uploaded into the cgi-bin.

Check your website files. The page that you want to display first when your web address is typed in must be named index.html or index.htm. Make sure the filename is all lowercase. The server is set to default to these options.

Pages other than the first page can be named as you wish, but we recommend sticking to lowercase and using no spaces or special characters other than the underscore ( _ ) character. Establishing this habit now makes it easier when it comes time to link pages or pictures.

CGI files should be uploaded into the cgi-bin. The cgi-bin lives on the same directory level as httpdocs (not inside httpdocs). CGI files should be uploaded in ASCII format to prevent corruption during upload. After uploading be sure to change permission on the files (chmod) to 755 for the files to execute.
More info on setting permissions can be found here.

We recommend using the ftp software provided by FileZilla. Its a free software that is user friendly.

With a quick search you can find the software to download to your computer. They offer multiple versions depending on the type of computer you’re using.

After you log into the ftp program, the control screen shown is broken into two parts. The right side is the remote system file area. This shows the files on your area of the web server. The left side shows the files on your local computer. On both sides you can move up and down through directories. To open a directory, double click on the directory.

To upload your files you will first need to double click on the httpdocs folder in the right hand window. The directory display line will change to read /httpdocs. You are now ready to upload files.

On the left side, move through directories on your local computer until you find the files which make up your website. When the files are displayed, single click on a file to select and highlight it. Once the file is highlighted, click and drag the file into the httpdoc directory. This will cause a copy of the file to be uploaded to our server.

Continue selecting and transferring files until all files that make up your website are transferred. When finished, click Close to disconnect from the server.

Permissions for the file can be changed in your FTP program after uploading. Below we have included an example from WS FTP. Other FTP programs may work differently, but should have an option for changing permissions. This option is often referred to as chmod, change permissions, modify permissions, etc. Refer to your FTP program’s help menus if you can’t find the permissions option. The maximum permissions allowed on our servers are 755.

 

Numeric	UNIX equivalent	Owner read/write/execute	Group read/write/execute	Other read/write/execute
755	rwxr-xr-x	Yes/Yes/Yes	Yes/No/Yes	Yes/No/Yes
744	rwxr–r–	Yes/Yes/Yes	Yes/No/No	Yes/No/No
644	rw-r–r–	Yes/Yes/No	Yes/No/No	Yes/No/No

Here’s the easy way to remember how the numbers work:

4=read

2=write

1=execute

So, if the other is set to read (4) and execute (1), the last digit would be 5.

 

Changing Permissions In WS FTP

1. To begin, you will need to upload your file into your cgi-bin on the server. Be sure to upload cgi files in ASCII or they will be corrupted during the upload process and not work.
2. In the Remote System window of WS FTP, single click on the file you wish to change permissions for to highlight it. Hover your mouse pointer over the filename and right click to drop down the menu. On the menu move to chmod(Unix) and click.
3. The Remote file permissions window will now appear. Check or uncheck boxes to set permissions as required. Keep in mind that the max permissions allowed on our server are 755. Refer to the chart above if you are unsure which boxes to check.
4. When finished, click OK.