bobpeers -> blog

You may or may not have noticed but my my site bobpeers.com went down over the weekend.

This blog seemed to work just fine but I was getting http 500 errors on my main site. Strangely I was able to view 2 or sometimes 3 pages before the error started but once I got the 500 error every page would then not work.

I viewed my hosts error log and first saw errors regarding these lines in my .htaccess file.

php_value session.use_trans_sid 0
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1

The simply stop the session ID being added to the URL and had been in my .htaccess file for ever. After removing these lines as a test I now saw lots of these errors logged.

[Fri Sep 04 03:45:46 2009] [notice] mod_fcgid: call
/home/bobpeers/public_html/blog/index.php with wrapper
/usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5
[Fri Sep 04 03:45:09 2009] [notice] mod_fcgid: call
/home/bobpeers/public_html/blog/index.php with wrapper
/usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5
[Fri Sep 04 03:44:51 2009] [notice] mod_fcgid: call
/home/bobpeers/public_html/HTTPErrors/500error.php with wrapper
/usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5

Seems like at some point my host went from using plain PHP5 to fastcgi but I have no idea if this is the cause of the error.

After 5 attempts to get a response from my hosts support without getting a single reply (and seeing that the forums are defunct and filled with spam) I decided it was time to jump ship.

After copying my content and MySQL databases he site is now back up running on Fatcow. it’s early days but I’m very happy so far.

My old host was very cheap but as the old saying goes ‘Pay peanuts and get monkeys’.

For reference my old host was Vonetwork and my advice is to steer clear!

For the second time in only a few months my site was down for god-knows-how-long. I first noticed when my main site and blog redirected to a moving page for the server that, rather ironically, returns a 404, page not found error.

It didn’t take me long to ftp to my site and look at the htaccess file to see that someone had added a line at the bottom to redirect all traffic to the page mentioned above. I removed the line and sure enough my site was still there, however after contacting support (who initially told me that they had not added the offending line!) it turns out that my server was moved to a new IP address.

This just required me to change my a records at my nameserver (I use Zoneedit and highly recommend them) and in a few minutes I could access the new server. More annoying was that I has not received any notification of the move, plus I had posted a new blog post but to the old server so I had to manually rewrite the entry since I could no no longer access the old server (Googles cache helps a lot in these situations).

I pay very little for my hosting so I cannot complain too much, however it is making me wonder if I should pay more to move hosts to a more reliable outfit (maybe Dreamhost).