It’s come to this… Mike and I need your help! For some reason WebHost4Life.com is not playing nicely with WordPress… well, not on his account anyway.
I’ve been a paying customer at WebHost4Life.com for quite a while now, and have had relatively little problems. I’ve been so impressed, in fact, that I recommended them to a buddy of mine (the one and only MikeDopp) to replace his 1and1 account. Everything went well in the beginning. Or so we thought. Permalinks only worked when they were set to default, not to “month/day/title” version, and some other “hokey” things. But we pressed forward.
Then things started getting weird. The theme would randomly change back to default, for instance. Weird! Then the site started exhibiting odd behavior, 404-ing here and there. Again, weird.
We opened a trouble-ticket to address these issued on 4/17/2007 6:06:10 PM. Things would be temporarily solved, then wig out again. Weird.
So we cleaned out the entire install, threw up our hands, and “said fine, you install it” to the WebHost4Life techs. They did, and things looked okay. Well, mostly. Now when we go to delete an item it will “turn red and fade out” but then turn back to red and give us and error “1″ or “0″ at the bottom of the posting list.
And in the several minutes that it’s taken to write this post, when the “auto save” or “saving draft” function is called it returns “Error: 78.”
WebHost4Life’s response: That by design, it’s supposed to do that. Strange, my install of WordPress 2.2 also hosted on WebHost4Life hardware behaves differently… it behaves the way it’s supposed to.
WebHost4Life’s technical support wants to shovel this off as a WordPress issue, not their fault, but we’re running the same version of WordPress right here, without problems.
Can any of your WebHost4Life users or WordPress 1337’s offer any advice?
Looking at the code a draft post is the same SQL query as a normal post…just with the $post_status field set to ‘draft’.
Does a normal post work?
Ironically, yes, a normal “Publish” click works just fine… and this is only with MikeDopp.com, JoeLevi.com (hosted on the same web host) works just fine.
I have a windows based hosting on webhost4life, and was getting 404 on permalinks when I installed 2.1.3.
After spending a few hours, I managed to find a solution that involved a php.ini and some wordpress code hacking.
Then I made the mistake of upgrading to 2.2, and my permalinks are broken again…
I see that you have them working here, are you on a windows hosting account too, and can you please tell me whether you had the same problem when installing WP?
Thanks.
ReallyVirtual,
Strangely enough, my WP install (all the way from 2.0 through 2.2) has worked without problems — and yes, it’s on a WebHost4Life Windows Hosting solution.
A little more detective work on http://www.MikeDopp.com has revealed that (even though they installed MikeDopp.com AFTER JoeLevi.com) he is on PHP4, whereas I’m on PHP5.
Mike’s petitioned WebHost4Life to move his stuff over to the same box as me (or at least one with PHP5 on it), but they’re wanting $20 to do it.
WP2.2 should just plain work, no hacks, no slashes, just proper permissions and correct file locations.
Let me know if you’re on PHP4 or PHP5.
That explains it. My hosting is a few years old and the box is running PH4. I think I’ll nag their Helpdesk and see what they say. (I’m impressed with their response times, even if they can’t always help out). There’s also a “.. dissatisfied with our service? email our CEO..” link there. Have you tried that for mikedopp.com?
ReallyVirtual, we haven’t confirmed the “php5 magic bullet” yet, but I’m pretty confident that will at least move the issue forward.
I’ve also been impressed with “urgent” ticket response times (non-urgent can take a while).
With MikeDopp.com, Mike tried escalating the ticket and eventually used the Email the CEO link. Once he did that the tone of the ticket turned from “it must be a WordPress issue, go ask them” to a “well, let’s see what else it could be” attitude.
Once we get it all fixed we’ll probably both ‘blog about it so others who are in the same boat can have another resource.
Since switching from PHP4 to PHP5 on your account will take a while, don’t forget to let me know when you’ve made the migration whether it worked or not.
Thanks for your input thus far!
So I started a trouble ticket, they set my application up for php5 (a box change was not needed). The index.php/%post_id% version is working now.
I’ve pasted my exchange with webhost4life below. It took around 12 hours for them to fix it, so I guess I’ll drop the idea of switching to a linux based hosting for now 🙂
Alvin (Staff)
6/20/2007 11:07:16 AM wordpress permalinks require “mod_rewrite”. However this is a com in Apache.
Currently you are using windows IIS server, this is not supported with IIS server.
However, we do support additional component such as linkfreeze, to do the same function as “mod_rewrite”(http://www.helicontech.com/order/#linkfreeze)
You might buy the licence from linkfreeze, and we can set it up for you with one-time $30. Thanks.
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Sohaib Athar
6/20/2007 11:45:48 AM Hi,
I know that mod_rewrite is required to take out the /index.php/ part from the URL, but I had it working with 2.1.3 on the same server with the URL format /index.php/postname before I upgraded to 2.2.
The workaround was a php.ini file with the lines:
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0
in it. It is not working anymore though when I upgraded last month I seem to recall that the upgrade was okay.
Has anything changed since then?
Benjie (staff)
6/20/2007 10:33:56 PM I have updated your application configuration mapping for .php to use php5 instead of php4. Please have another try now.
So now that you’re on WP2.2 and PHP5, are you seeing any issues, or did that resolve them all?
It resolved the 404 and works with the /index.php/%post_id% permalink… removing index.php still won’t work though I guess that is expected. I’ll test out the whole thing on the weekend (and finally start blogging, I was putting it off until I made sure the links will stay).
Thanks for the php5 tip, I was clueless on why wordpress broke on an upgrade.
So I have been moved to php5 server and the issue still remains. My next task is to delete all the old install, Backup the database and reinstall. I am thinking this might be my last install of any wordpress blog engine. 🙁
Want me to help?