Hostmonster Favicon Havok

[gentle]

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]

I agree. Amen!

[Benjamin]

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.

[gentle]

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]

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

[gentle]

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]

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]

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

[Aaron]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Your browser caches the favicon.

Check my site, I have a custom favicon.

[tensaku.org]

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]

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]

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]

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()"><span style="background-color:black;"><font color="#0099FF" size="2" face="Verdana"><span style="background-color:black;"><i><font color="#FF9900"><img src="favicon.ico" width="16" height="16" border="0" alt="Skoolie Bookmark The White Elephant's Tale Home"></font></i></span></font></span></a>


<script language="JAVASCRIPT" type="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT">
<!--
/************************************************** **
AUTHOR: www.alouwebdesign.ca
URL: http://www.alouwebdesign.ca
Use the script, just leave this message intact.
************************************************** **/

var url = "http://www.thewhiteelephantstale.com";
var title = "The White Elephant's Tale";

function makeLink(){
if(document.all)
window.external.AddFavorite(url,title)

}

// -->

</script>

Hope this helps!

[digitalady]

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