Upon purchasing a Freestart Website Package, your website will be online within 48 hours of initial purchase. If for some reason you cannot access your website directly as any visitor would, it could be due to numerous factors:

1. You are typing the website address incorrectly.

This is surprisingly a common error as to why people cannot access their website. You will need to ensure that you type your domain name with www. at the beginning, followed by the necessary extension (ie .com, .co.uk, .net, and so on). Your domain name will be decided upon purchase of the website and will appear on your deed of ownership sheet for the Freestart Website Package.

2. You are typing the website address into a search engine.

The majority of Internet browsers come complete with their own search bar nowadays, which allows for quick access to the popular search engines (ie Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc). If your website address does not appear upon typing it in, it could be due to the following reasons:

a) Your website is relatively new
b) Your website has no/limited logical content in it for search engines to pick up on
c) Your website has not been submitted to the search engines*

*It is not compulsory for the website to be submitted in order to appear on the search engines, however it can help to speed up the procedure.

It is strongly recommended to type your website address into the address bar of your Internet browser, especially within the early stages of your website's life span.

The bars highlighted in red are search bars and will bring up results from a search engine. The bar highlighted in green is the main address bar and will take you directly to the website address you enter.

For more information on search engines, please click here.

3. Your Freestart Website Package has expired.

If you have had your Freestart website for over a year and have not responded to our renewal notifications, chances are your website package and domain name have expired. To resolve this, you will need to contact our administration team on 0870 741 5296 Ext. 2 and ask for the renewals department in order to reactivate your website.

4. Your website fails to load up and presents you with an error message.

If you continue to receive any error messages upon reviewing the list , it could be due to a variety of connectivity issues. If you are having problems connecting to various websites besides your own, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) could be at fault.

It could also be due to various settings within your Internet Browser itself (especially if you have installed any new add-ons, anti-virus programs, or updates that relate to your browser). You will need to consult your browser help section or browser website/knowledgebase to troubleshoot any problems you are experiencing. It would also be recommended to try accessing your website from a different computer/Internet connection to see if the problem persists.

Some browsers have an option to work offline. If you have this option enabled, you wont be able to access any websites on the Internet until you disable work offline. Here is an example of how to find the option within the Internet Explorer browser.

If you continue to experience problems with accessing the website, please feel free to call our support line on 0844 774 2974 or email support@freestart.com so we can help you further.