Frequently Asked Questions

The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET FAQ (*)

Troubleshooting (*)

How should I describe problems I'm seeking help with?

Why can't I delete or change the permissions of these files my web application created?

If I have a directory called example, why can't I refer to it as /example?

Why does my site keep redirecting to the wrong alias?

What does it mean that a site "has temporarily exceeded its connection limit?"

I can't access my site at all. What should I check first?

What do I do if someone is trying to waste my site's bandwidth?

Why shouldn't I refer to my site as "example.com" in the forum?

Why does your credit card form say my address (or zip) "failed validation" even though I know it is correct?

Why do I sometimes receive an "Access Denied" error when visiting my site?

Why am I getting a "premature end of script headers" error when I try to run a script?

Why doesn't my .htaccess file work with Apache 2.4?

There are a few incompatibilities between Apache 2.2 and 2.4. These are described in detail in the Apache 2.4 documentation.

In most cases, the source of compatibility problems is an .htaccess file. If it is not compatible with Apache 2.4, it will cause your site to return "500 Internal Server Error."

To narrow down the specific cause, we recommend that you enable your site's error log in the member interface (if you haven't already). Once it is enabled, access the site a few times to exercise the error, and then the error_log file in your site's logs directory should point you directly to the problem.

The most common example comes from using the Order directive to restrict access to certain content. It has been completely removed from Apache 2.4, but is still very common in example files and configs distributed with many web applications that haven't been updated yet.

To update a 2.2 .htaccess file containing something like:

Order deny,allow
Deny from all

the 2.4 equivalent of both lines would be the single line:

Require all denied

to deny all access and:

Require all granted

to allow it.

Other 2.2-specific configuration directives that have changed in 2.4 can be similarly adapted. See the Apache documentation linked above for complete details.

Why do I get "The requested URI could not be accessed" when logging in to the control panel of my WordPress site?

Why is there a tiny bug icon on a page in the member interface?

Why is my WordPress site asking for FTP credentials?