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PNG files at Fasthosts

This site was hosted by Fasthosts. I have recently changed to Blackfoot and have experienced no problems yet. Fasthosts are incompetent and I urge you not to use their services. I will outline all the problems they caused on a separate page soon. For the moment, I will leave this account of the correspondence I had with their technical support people.

This server generates an incorrect header when serving png image files. The server specifies an incorrect content type. Fasthosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) have refused to fix this. I wrote to Fasthosts support pointing out the problem. I included the HTTP response to a png file request. Fasthosts failed to acknowledge that there was a problem.

GET http://mews.org.uk/images/mews.png HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 05:21:27 GMT
Age: 66
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 05:05:12 GMT
Content-Length: 15445
Etag: "ae80ee7aa97bf1:4822d"
Via: 1.1 proxy.ozemail.com.au (NetCache 4.0R3D1)


Of course the Content-Type line should read as follows:
Content-Type: image/png

as it does in the following request:

GET http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/img_png/png-tiny.png HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 09:02:38 GMT
Age: 672085
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Sun, 05 Sep 1999 00:25:33 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: image/png
Content-Length: 487
Etag: "e30d7-1e7-37d1b87d"
Via: 1.1 proxy.ozemail.com.au (NetCache 4.0R3D1)


Eventually I got an idiotic response from Fasthosts support:

Hello Alex,

I am afraid that as these png files are stored on our NT servers,
will not be able to be viewed via linux, as our servers do not
support these header types.

I explained that my use of Linux does not affect the headers produced by their servers. I explained that their servers can generate correct headers for png files but some basic configuration is required. I pointed them at the relevant Microsoft URL which explains how to configure MIME types for IIS. This message was ignored as were several more, until finally Fasthosts admitted that "we cannot do this on our public servers." They still haven't explained why they cannot.

Fasthosts are clearly offering a substandard service. It's not as if png is in any way weird; it's been supported in the Internet Explorer browser since version 4.0 and in Netscape since 4.04

It is not clear whether Fasthosts are suffering from incompetence or stupidity. As a workaround, until Fasthosts see sense or learn how to configure their servers, I have written a short CGI script to generate the correct header.