When you first open your website, you may see the extra characters like ?i=1 at the end of your URL. This article explains more about what causes it, and what you can do about it.
What causes the ?i=1 suffix?
This extra URL parameter is caused by a security system we use to protect your website. This security system ensures that your website can only be accessed through regular web browsers.
What does the ?i=1 suffix do?
The ?i=1 suffix is a counter. When you first load your website, some Javascript will be sent to your browser to verify it can execute the code and store a cookie. The page will then reload with the ?=1 suffix. On the next request, the server checks if your browser has the security system cookie. If not, your browser will get a new security challenge to set the cookie again, and be redirected to a URL with suffix ?i=2.
If the counter hits 3 and your browser still doesn’t send a valid cookie, you’ll be redirected to a page with instructions on how to enable cookies in your browser. This way, your browser will not get stuck in a redirect loop.
Can I remove the ?i=1 URL suffix?
The security system responsible for the ?i=1 suffix is mandatory on all websites. Because of that, the security system cannot be disabled, so neither can the URL suffix.
Note that premium hosting does not have a security system like this.
Its not particularly old fassioned. But its used as a simple, low resource and effective system to secure our websites. Yes there are better aproaches, but they cost more, and are more resource intensive. Hence they are only on the premium hosting.
I’ve seen multiple free hosting platforms do the same
this is dumb and horrible
why you force us to do so claiming its for our security nobody asked for it
at least make automatic redirect from www.xyz.com to www.xyz. com/?i=1
Its part of the free hosting, that you agreed to when sigining up. It could be a lot worse, trust me. I had a site with another free hosting provider, and you could only access the site through their landing page AND they injected adds.
By comparison this is actually really amazing.
If you really don’t like premium is still an option
Because nobody cares about security until it (or the lack of it) affects them negatively.
Nobody likes protection against hacking that blocks suspicious requests, until it’s their website that gets hacked and we are blamed for not protecting it.
Nobody likes anti-DDoS measures that blocks some legitimate traffic, until the server gets attacked, all websites slow down or even go down, and we are blamed for not keeping the websites up.
We as a hosting provider have the responsibility to provide a fast, reliable and secure hosting environment. And it’s our responsibility to determine which measures we need to take to achieve that. And it’s up to us to determine what features or usability we can sacrifice to achieve that.
Please also consider that we provide completely free hosting, and the margins for free hosting are razor thin. So we can’t just add more servers to handle attack traffic, because servers costs a lot of money, but we get no money from you.
With that in mind, if you are willing to pay money to not be subject to such restrictions, please consider premium hosting. Which costs money and doesn’t have this security system.
No, as the article states you cannot remove the system. And just use another letter, j or q are solid choices in the random letter category in my opinion.
