Hostgator upgrade killed my site

Hi dgmufasa,

They sent out an email notice ahead of time about the upcoming change.
It directed me to log in an "test" my site compatibility by changing the PHP version
and and then to manually test my site.

According to the email, I could switch back if necessary, but eventually the choice
would not be available.
So far, I'm OK.

Maybe this will work for you? If it does, it will be temporary.



Regards,

Mike.

You might try posting this over here:

Programming Talk

Someone might be able to tell you what to do.

Ready for it....?

Get in touch with the guys at BigScoots.com!

They will never pull any crap like that and if they accidentally did, they'd have it fixed faster than you'd wait in the queue to chat with someone at HG who really doesn't care... 99% of HG's support staff is there for a paycheck, not to actually 'help'

You gotta get to a smaller outfit for the kind of personal service you deserve.

We were getting Server 500 error after Server 500 error on HostGator and experienced all kinds of random downtime with them on our money site. I've been with several hosts, have run a hosting company, worked for a major hosting company and in all of my experience, no one has come close to what BigScoots offers.

-Miles

I had to re update my blog i you should do the same check your e-mail because they send out an e-mail telling the step you should do to get things working if something goes wrong

My Easy Clickmate installation died. I spent Sunday afternoon installing it on another domain as a backup. I did get the warning email but did not expect perfectly well behaved software to stop working. Now I have to go and upgrade two Easy ClickMate setups to avoid problems in the future.

It's weird that a site would get screwed by a PHP upgrade. Maybe you should have a programmer look over your code and make it compatible with the new version of PHP.

Not sure if you can control PHP settings from Hostgator control panel, but if you can I recommend to turn off display_errors for security reasons. display_errors on is fine if you are developing a script on localhost, but it is considered unsafe on the server.

Hostgator is a horrible company. Just don't use it. And don't use any companies from EIG as well:
Endurance International Group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The sad truth is that Hostgator has been going down the drain since they've been bought out by EIG.
Personally I am experiencing really bad service. My sites are not a lot slower. My sites have been down many times in the past few months.

The customer support used to be great, now it's horrible. Their techs deny the HG is at fault every single time I contact them. Hostgator is not what it used to be. After 7 years of being with them I am getting ready to change the host

One of my sites was affected. I contacted support and they set it to the previous version of php and it works fine now. Don't know why they wouldn't be able to do that to yours.

Here's an extract from HG's email pertaining to this problem.

Click on the "PHP Configuration" icon, which can be found under the "Advanced" group of icons in cPanel. * At this point you will want to test your sites by opening them in your browser. If you do not notice any issues or visible errors, this means your sites are compatible with PHP 5.4 and you do not need to perform any further actions to ensure they continue to work once the PHP upgrade is performed. You will simply want to leave the Handler that was just set as the active one without any other changes. * If on the other hand, you do notice issues during your test with your sites and the PHP 5.4 Handler that was enabled, you can then simply toggle the active Handler via our plugin and set it to use "PHP 5.2".

This should set your account to specifically use the the current default version of PHP in our servers and ensure they continue to use this version once the PHP upgrade process is performed. Our upgrade process is set to honor the current Handler settings you set via this plugin to ensure your scripts continue to work once the upgrade is completed.

Please note: Selecting "No custom Handler (Sys Default)", will NOT ensure your account stays using PHP 5.2 once the PHP upgrade is complete. While PHP 5.2 is currently the system default version, once the upgrade is complete, the default version will be PHP 5.4. If your applications require PHP 5.2 you will want to make sure to specifically select the "PHP 5.2" option.Downgrading will restore your broken sites, at least it did 3 of mine, but at some point you will need to fix the problem.

1) You for sure can roll back your version of PHP. HostGator should have sent you an email with instructions to do this if you want.

2) If your theme cant handle the newest version of PHP it is outdated and should be replaced anyway.

I just got the message from HostGator and the update is supposed to happen on 21 May, 2014 - so why it happens to today or the day you posted it, dgmufasa?

On the other hand what is your site's current PHP version? And does it use any Forum software too?

I got this email as well. I'm keeping my head in the sand and hoping it'll all be OK.

Yesterday my Godaddy sites were all 500'ing.

The only law of web hosting is to have at least two different hosting companies.

Stay away from hostgator and if you do use it back up and back up often. Good luck

I contacted the support and got someone who guided me to the point where I could change the PHP version. I changed it to 5.3. I contacted the developer of the theme (Simplekey) and his suggestion was to upgrade to a later version. He (developer of Simplekey) also pointed out that in the PHP error log showed some of the plugins were also not working - so, this did not just affect the theme but also other plugins as well. I saw a count of 8 and had turned of 2 of them.

I downloaded the newer version of the theme but am a little reluctant to install it (even though I am working with a child theme).

If HG wants to upgrade, it would be nice if in addition to sending out an email that they fix it so that when people log in, a pop-up shows up saying that an upgrade has been planned. It should not be hard since they have pop-ups all the time advertising additional services/features.

Either way, I hope that the option to remain at 5.3 is ~not~ temporary. It's not like I want to stay at version 2.x or 4.x.