Hostmonster Favicon Havok [Archive]

gentle

10-13-2006, 05:33 PM

I've spent the past week porting a few of my old sites from my old server to Hostmonster's servers. By and large, my experience has been great.

There is, however, one thing that's been bugging me. The Hostmonster favicon that seems to insert itself on every page! I've deleted it countless times, but it keeps coming back.

I don't understand why hostmonster does this. It can't be for branding purposes, as most people don't recognize the icon as anything in particular. It's nothing but a nuisance. Please! Someone put an end to this madness!

Phil

10-13-2006, 05:55 PM

I agree. Amen!

Benjamin

10-13-2006, 06:54 PM

gentle

10-13-2006, 07:05 PM

Benjamin,

No.

I don't want ANY favicon. Please. No. If I delete the Hostmonster icon, it comes back. Why?! Turn this "feature" off. It does no good for anyone. Please!

Marvin

10-13-2006, 07:33 PM

you could always have a blank favicon... plain white. that way it wont show.
job done

gentle

10-14-2006, 12:03 PM

I guess I can't understand why I have to do extra work to keep Hostmonster from marketing on my site which I pay them to host.

What's more IT'S NOT EVEN EFFECTIVE MARKETING. No one knows what the hm favicon represents.

Let me delete the favicon and be done with it! It's so obnoxious!

bobbydo

10-14-2006, 01:55 PM

I had the same problem with my Favicon image. Host monster kept replacing mine with theirs. I did call them for help and they were surprised to find out that the icon should be 15 pixels and not 16 that was designed with the Favicon program.
Change yours to 15 pixels then replace theirs with yours and you should be fine.

Bob

;)

http://www.mesquiteweather.com

Aaron

10-15-2006, 12:44 PM

I replaced the favicon with a 15 pixel one but it still doesn't show.

Aaron

10-15-2006, 01:03 PM

Oh, it's working now. And the stupid trial version of IconCool does not allow resizing to 15 pixels. I managed to find a freeware Icon editor though. It's called IconFX.

It can be downloaded from here (http://www.snapfiles.com/get/icofx.html)

virtualahmad

10-15-2006, 02:21 PM

i am withgentle 100%. This so called "feature" is not welcome by any means... "go and replace it" is not the right attitude from any company... let alone the company that is hosting YOUR site and MY site.

paul

10-15-2006, 08:04 PM

I too was experiencing the icon resurrection blues, so I serached the Internet for an answer. Apparently, most browsers request "/favicon.ico" when they load any page on your site. If the file did not exist, there would be a file not found error every time anyone viewed your site. You can imagine how many errors would end up in the server error log after a busy day.

Anyway, the word on the street is that you can bypass the server error and still not have a favorite icon on your website by adding the following to "~/public_html/.htaccess":

# Don't bother looking for favicon.ico
Redirect 404 /favicon.ico

# Don't bother sending the error page for favicon.ico, no one sees it anyway
<Files favicon.ico>
ErrorDocument 404 "No icon.
</Files>

Be sure not to add an end quote to ("No icon). It looks weird but it's correct for Apache 1.3. The syntax is different in newer versions of Apache.

stephen

10-15-2006, 08:12 PM

Hello;

Paul is correct that is why we created the FavIcon, the logs were scrolling with the error and it made difficult for us as well as customers to troubleshoot possible issues on the site.

Aaron

10-15-2006, 10:21 PM

Looks like Hostmonster took flak for the wrong reason, although I would say they could have created a blank favicon and informed customers that they have a choice of making their own! :)

virtualahmad

10-16-2006, 06:46 PM

Hello;

Paul is correct that is why we created the FavIcon, the logs were scrolling with the error and it made difficult for us as well as customers to troubleshoot possible issues on the site.

why would you not just create a blank icon ? I really would like to see this changed.

interstice

01-04-2007, 07:56 AM

After trying several different ways of getting a custom favicon to work on a client's site hosted by hostmonster, i give up. I really like the features that HM offers, but the HM branding favicon negates every nifty feature for me.

I tried using image/x-icon and image/png in my xhtml file.

I tried uploading the favicon.ico and favicon.png to public_html, the sub-directory the site is in, as well as putting it into a custom directory linked to from the <head> icon info...

I tried making the icon image 15x15 and 16x16.

no luck. I know it can be done, but after spending a good 3 hours it looks like i may have to go with a different host.

edit: you beat me to it, Err0r, once I cleared my cache the favicon showed up. thanks :)

btw, i found a (what i think is better) any-image-to-.ico program: http://www.irfanview.com/. It allows you to open any type of image file and save as .ico

Err0r

01-04-2007, 08:00 AM

Your browser caches the favicon.

Check my site, I have a custom favicon.

tensaku.org

01-09-2007, 07:19 AM

For Mac users, here's a useful tutorial:

http://www.nicholaspyers.com/articles/20030330-favicon/

But I sympathize with Gentle's beef--stuff like that should STAY deleted.

McCoy

01-09-2007, 09:10 AM

I didn't have any problem changing the favicon, it worked right away, but I agree: the default logo should be a white empty square, not HM's logo.

onebeats

05-11-2007, 07:07 PM

Hi, I followed this post all the way through and tried all the steps suggested, but couldn't get my fav icon to change or show up. On the remote site it showed my icon uploaded as the only favicon.ico on there, I tried 15 and 16px sizes. The one thing I noticed that was funny and didn't conform to this post was when I would delete the favicon.ico from my the remote site it would appear to be gone, however when I check my site via FF the icon would still be there, then I'd go back and check if HM replaced it and nothing, gone. I'm looking in the http_docs folder as all these post suggest that it is, but for some reason it seems that's not where mine is located. Thank you for any input.

Jared.

griff671

05-12-2007, 11:54 PM

This is how I do it on my sites:

My icons are 16x16 and named favicon.ico - the following html and javascript are taken directly from the source of the site in my signature below:

<a href="javascript:makeLink()"><img src="favicon.ico" width="16" height="16" border="0" alt="Skoolie Bookmark The White Elephant's Tale Home"></a>

<script language="JAVASCRIPT" type="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT">


</script>

Hope this helps!

digitalady

05-13-2007, 05:35 AM

ALl the editors change teh size to 16X16.. is there an icon editor for MAC users???

Suthnautr

12-17-2010, 05:06 PM

The industry standard Favicon size is 16 pixels. I can easily create a 16 pixel Hostmonster favicon and email it to Hostmonster if they can't do it themselves (but of course that is absurd, they are quite far above us in the area of hosting and favicon server settings). Instead they have deliberately (and correct me if I'm wrong - it was done deliberate and in spite of numerous requests from numerous people in the forum as well as untold numbers of people who don't know enough to ask or join the forum) set the favicon to 15 x 15 pixel. My two icon maker softwares are both multiple choice - with "favicon" set by default to 16 pixel. That works for me just fine using any standard browser - but my Android gets the 15 x 15 and that's very annoying. Every other bookmark in Android shows the correct favicon except mine. So I have to go to a special web site to create a 15x15 favicon when I have two perfectly good favicon makers/editors installed. What's that URL again? After reading through so many solutions I can't find it now.

Suthnautr

12-17-2010, 05:16 PM

There's an easy fix to get rid of the icon... Replace it with your own.

For an icon editor, try IconCool. http://www.tucows.com/preview/293347

Just save the icon as favicon.ico, and insert it into your public_html/ directory. If you have addon domains, place the favicon for the addon into the main addon folder. It is not necessary to place the icon in subfolders.

This is nuts - pay $31.95 for a favicon editor that's not stated to make 15x15 pix favicons at tucows when I already have 2 favicon makers / editors - just to make a favicon that's non-standard size because (apparently) *no-one* at Hostmonster (and this is patently absurd and absolutely untrue) knows how to make the server use a 16x16 pix favicon.ico? Who's fooling whom?

The commercials are all over my twitter account and facebook - and on my own website and to every client I have - USE HOSTMONSTER / THEY ARE THE BEST.

You want your favicon more than new customers and more than my recommendations? You want that? You got it. I'm not stupid. Heck. I've signed up several people in the past two years - and not even through the affiliate program. When you get rid of that I'll do it some more. Until then I'll go with one of the other top 10 best hosting companies. My site shows my favicon, my android bookmark shows the HM favicon. I don't want to see it. Blank would be preferable.

pghcollectibles

12-18-2010, 12:09 AM

all of my icons are 16x16 i dont have a problem with any. Put this in your <head>:
<link rel='shortcut icon' href='favicon.ico' >
<link rel='icon' type='image/gif' href='favicon.gif' >It's just part of proper coding. also you can add this to your .htaccess file in the main directory:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^favicon.ico$ skins/default/images/favicon.ico
</IfModule> That location just happens to be the default used by roundcube, yours can be wherever you want it. mod rewrite should be on in everyone's settings unless you disabled it in php.ini or something so you should be able to use this also:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^favicon.ico$ skins/default/images/favicon.icoif you already have the line "RewriteEngine On" just place the RewriteRule on a line anywhere below it on a line of its own

DearSweetAru

12-18-2010, 06:41 PM

Falcon1986

12-18-2010, 07:34 PM

I was skimming through this topic, but I'm still confused...

I followed what HM tells me to do on this page:
http://helpdesk.hostmonster.com/index.php/kb/article/000104

But the blasted favicon still won't appear on my website. I mean, I don't get the HM favicon... there just seems to be nothing there at all. I won't DIE without one, but I'd really like it to be there out of preference.

Here's my site:
http://www.dearsweetaru.net/

Not sure how much it'll help, but yeeeeah...

So, help, please?

There is nothing wrong with the article. However, it was implied that you should change the domain name within the URL reference. Your-web-site-name.com was just used as an generic example.

Secondly, save your favicon to the root web directory of your website, i.e. in ~/public_html if your website is installed there.

DearSweetAru

12-18-2010, 10:06 PM

Ooohh! lmao. My bad. I was totally rushing myself and missed that I had to edit that part lol. I do have the favicon uploaded in my public_html area, I guess I just didn't notice the "your-web-site-name.com" area; that definitely explains why it wasn't working.

Well, thanks for noticing my error :) Imma go edit that and hope it works.

pghcollectibles

12-18-2010, 11:09 PM

looks good

DearSweetAru

12-19-2010, 12:12 AM

Here's me being an annoying butt lol.

Okay, so I'm looking around yet again, still concerning the favicon, but I'm failing at finding anything on google.

I have the Simple Machines forum for my website and I was wondering if any of ya'll knew how to put the favicon on there as well; I'm failing at finding where I would put one.

Falcon1986

12-19-2010, 07:35 AM

I have never used SMF, but it appears to use the same template system as many other forum software.

Locate index.template.php in the default theme's directory and open in a simple text editor. You will see a lot of code, but search for line 93 (just after the stylesheet reference) and insert the following code:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico" />
As always, modify "path/to/favicon.ico".

The actual line where you place this reference is not really important; what is important is that it is placed within <head></head>. Essentially, it should look something like this:

<?php
// Lots of code with comments
<head>
// Lots of code with comments
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="', $settings['default_theme_url'], '/fonts-compat.css" />';
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico" />
// Lots of code with comments
</head>
...

redsaf

12-21-2010, 12:29 PM

I have the Simple Machines forum for my website and I was wondering if any of ya'll knew how to put the favicon on there as well; I'm failing at finding where I would put one.

www.plrprivatelabelrights.com (http://www.plrprivatelabelrights.com)

zuerston

12-25-2010, 08:43 AM

I put my custom made favicon in the public_html and also the root directory's of my web account, and it works, and it stays, and nomo 404 on that thing, I just made me a favicon with "KiconEdit" and uploaded it with gFTP as stated. I made it just a tad bigger than a stock favicon and it shows up great in browsers a nice big red/green/black Z

It will show on every page on your account

Simple Machines forums work great,nice,easy to operate, and the spammers REALLY LOVE Simple Machines forums TOO!