About the service

What is Sauropol? What can I do with it?

Sauropol is a free online service for creating instant websites:

- Set up your own website and start publishing content in less than a minute.
- Change your site’s look and feel by quickly switching between various designs from our collection of pre-made templates.
- You don’t need any technical skills to manage your website. But in case you do, there are lots of ways to use them: whether to create custom add-on applications or to customize what we have to offer.
- You only need a web browser for all of this.

See more features.

Why should I use it? Is it just another blog engine?

Although you can also create blogs here, it’s just a subset of our offering to create full featured websites with news lists, bulletin boards, image galleries and multiple layouts.
Choose Sauropol if you don't want to bother searching out the most suitable software, install it on the server, maintain and upgrade it or worry about security. We offer complex service providing you all of that, seamlessly in the background.

See more features.

What does it cost, is it free? Are there any banner ads?

Creating websites at Sauropol is free for everybody and will always stay that way.

We will never torture our users with annoying banner ads as we dislike them as much as you do. If you enjoy our free service we would be glad if you keep the link to Sauropol in the footer of your website.

Can I use Sauropol for blogging? Image gallery? Forum?

Sure. Just choose an appropriate content template in the section editor and it is ready to use.

Can I register my own domain in Sauropol?

This option will be available in our premium service soon to be launched.

What do I need to use Sauropol? What is the technology used?

To take a full advantage of all the editing tools you should use web browser Mozilla Firefox 2.0 to 3.0 or Internet Explorer 6 to 7 on Windows, Linux or Mac OS workstations.
Sauropol uses Saurus CMS content management software on the widely spread LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. We also implement various open source solutions and use the latest web technologies like AJAX to offer the better user experience.

How much disk space I have? What other limitations exist?

The free package currently has 50 MB disk space and 1 GB data transfer amount in a month per one website.

Can I use FTP or SSH?

No, we are not offering traditional hosting services like FTP or SSH - there are thousands of competitive hosting providers in the market for that purpose. Sauropol is aimed to fulfill the needs of easy website creation and versatile content management operations.

What is the difference between Saurus and Sauropol?

Saurus is a web software company focusing on content management and web publishing solutions since year 2000.
Sauropol is an online service for creating instant websites offered by Saurus.

What is Saurus CMS?

Saurus CMS is a packaged web publishing software developed by Saurus, running thousands of mission critical websites worldwide which is now also used for powering Sauropol sites.

Can I install Sauropol on my own server?

Yes! You can download and install a packaged version of Saurus CMS, the software used to run Sauropol sites. Saurus CMS has both free and commercial packages available.

Account

How do I sign up?

Head to the sign-up page to create your account. You'll be automatically redirected to your site, ready for editing.

How do I log in to my site?

To log in and start editing content go to www.sauropol.com/login. Optionally, you can also type “editor” after your site name – eg. mysite.sauropol.com/editor. These both work the same way.

I have forgotten my password

Go to the pasword reset page, enter your username or e-mail and we will send a new password to your e-mail address.

Will my account expire when I don’t use it for a long time?

In case you are using the free service and you have not logged in to your site for one year, we may deactivate your site and account.

How do I backup my site?

You don't have to, we are running automatic nightly backups.

How can I delete my site or account?

Site can be deleted only when you delete your account. Send a request to support at sauropol dot com.

Can I use my own domain name?

Yes, please follow the instructions in next question “How to point my domain to Sauropol?”

How to point my domain to Sauropol?

Before you can start using your own domain name for a Sauropol website, you have to point it to our server first.

To do so, use the tools provided by your domain registrar's website to point the domain's A-record (IP address) to 75.125.137.50. Please note that you need to change your domain's A Record, not its nameservers. Once you've done this, you may need to wait up to 36 hours for the change to take effect.

Then, log into your Sauropol website and choose Properties > My Account to type in your domain name here.

Features

Custom domain name

You can now use a custom domain name for your Sauropol website. By “custom domain”, we mean a site address other than the default format of username.sauropol.com.

If you do not own a domain yet, you can buy one from a registrar like GoDaddy or Register. Once you own a domain, use the tools provided by your domain registrar's website to point the domain's A-record (IP address) to 75.125.137.50. Please note that you need to change your domain's A Record, not its nameservers. Once you've done this, you may need to wait up to 36 hours for the change to take effect.

Then, log into your Sauropol website and choose Properties > My Account to type in your domain name there. Good luck!

Can I create multilingual websites?

The easiest way to build multilingual websites is to name the first level menus by language name and create sub menus accordingly.

How do I change the site design? Can I use my own HTML?

Log in to your site and choose “Properties > Site design” from the editor toolbar. This will list all available design templates and allows you to apply or download any of them.
By downloading, you will get a .zip package - study it's contents. With little knowledge about HTML, Javascript and basic programming, you should be able to change, customize or replace the template code. To test it out, pack all the files to one .zip file again and upload it to your site. Check out the API Reference for further explanation.

What about statistics? Can I add Google Analytics code to my site?

We recommend tracking your site statistics using Google Analytics:
- First, sign up with Google Analytics to retrieve a small tracking code for your website.
- Log in to your site, open „Properties > Site properties“ from the editor toolbar, enter that code to the „Page-end HTML“ textbox and save your changes. A few days later your site statistics will appear under your Google Analytics account.

How do I optimize my site for search engines?

Search engine optimizing or “SEO” is a whole science, but there's couple of basic steps you should at least consider:
- Use appropriate meta data. Log in to your site, open “Properties > Site properties“ page from the  editor toolbar and fill in the “Meta-info“ fields.
- Customize human-friendly URL-s that are generated automatically when you create new content to match the keywords that your target audience is searching for.
- Do the same with each page content: make sure the potential search phrases exist in your texts.

Can I transfer my Sauropol site to a different host?

Not really. What you can do, is to download the packaged Saurus CMS software and install it on another hosting provider or your own server to run your site. In addition, we are planning to implement site content export/import feature for easy data exchange between different sites.

How can I transfer my old website to Sauropol?

There is no automatic tool available yet, but we are in process of planning to build one. Currently you really have to use the good old copy-paste method.