Blogging

If you use Bluehost and tried updating PHP to counter the error messages WordPress generates indicating the version of PHP your running is out of date, you may have subsequently came across the following error message after updating PHP from V5 to 7:

“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress”

There’s a simple fix for this issue but its not documented anywhere on Bluehosts Support pages

Just login to the CPanel access the File Manager and rename your PHP.ini file to PHP.ini.bak

So you may have heard Bluehost enabled free SSL certificates for WordPress users on Shared plans and gone ahead and enabled it

But you ran into the same issue I had when adding your new fangled https:// enabled domain name into Google Webmasters Search Console

It just won’t take your new https://www.mysite.com domain name saying it’s already been added

Try adding an ending forward slash to your https://www.mysite.com domain instead

https://www.mysite.com becomes https://www.mysite.com/

Well – I’d finally had enough of GoDaddy’s incessant time outs which they’d attributed to common run of the mill plugins like JetPack and others.

I’d installed their recommended caching plugins to try and improve page load times and even installed their own proprietary P3 profiler plugin to measure my blog stats but it didn’t tell me anything I already knew, that my tiny wordpress blog was responding like a fly stuck in a jar of honey. Granted I’m on a shared plan and I take it as a given that the page load times won’t be instant on a shared host – but page time out’s and ultra slow load times I will not stand for.

So it was time to up sticks and move to another provider.

My main criteria for moving was that the host have great performance and support for WordPress.

There’s a ton of conflicting advice on the internet about the best WordPress host – believe me, I’ve researched this for a long time so I decided to go with the advice from the horses mouth – WordPress itself, and Bluehost it was. Look they’re right up the top, like the gold winning champ they are and it’s been a huge improvement – the time outs and slow page opening times have been eliminated, even though I’m still using Jetpack, – isn’t that strange GoDaddy?

I’ve also found out the reason GoDaddy’s shared hosting can’t cut the cheese – they don’t throttle down “abusive” users like Bluehost do with their shared hosting users.

My advice – go with Bluehost for your WordPress blog, it’ll save the hair pulling and back pain of transferring your blog from GoDaddy when you realise they’re not up to the task. It was a great learning experience, but not something I’d recommend if you don’t have a technical background.

I has some problems updating to the latest version of Jetpack today – version 1.9.2. Normally the automatic install from within the Dashboard carries off without a hitch but today I had to dig into my GoDaddy FTP host storage to resurrect my Jetpack statistics.

I started off the automatic install but at the point where the new Jetpack files are downloaded and unzipped the installation looks like it goes nowhere.

I attempted to kick off the install again and left it over night to see if that would jump start Jetpack but when I checked my Dashboard this morning I found the admin GUI and all my stats had been erased from the Dashboard like it had never been installed – not good.

So I decided to launch my GoDaddy Account Admin FTP Manager – that wasn’t playing ball either, returning a spinning circle when attempting to read the wp-admin wp-includes and wp-content folders.

Time to break out the big guns – luckily I’d already installed Filezilla and knew the in’s and outs of connecting to GoDaddy’s FTP, what I found when I connected to my shared FTP was a jetpack.tmp folder located within wp-contentupgrade. I was wary of deleting this folder but there were no config files lower down in any of this folders sub-folders so I guessed the update process aborted itself for whatever reason and went ahead deleting jetpack.tmp

All Jetpack stats are stored at wordpress.org so after another Jetpack 1.9.2 automatic install from the Dashboard, I got them all back – job well done.

I had some problems with my WordPress blog not displaying new posts unless I was logged in as an admin.

Fine for me but a major problem for readers of my blog – since they all can’t be logged in as admin’s 😉

I found the problem started once I updated to WordPress 3.4.0.

If you use WP Super Cache 1.1 try de-activating it as the new posts showed up straight after.

Don’t get me wrong – I love  WP Super Cache as it vastly improved my blogs performance (hosted with GoDaddy) by eliminating a lots of page time-out errors a few months ago (I’m on a shared plan and performance isn’t a priority for me yet).

I’m not going to say the above is specifically an incompatibility between WordPress 3.4 and WP Super Cache 1.1 as I don’t have a very common hosting configuration (so another factor could be involved) but for me – that’s what worked.

If it works for you please get in touch with Donncha the plugin developer.

I’m going to leave WP Super Cache disabled for now as I’m not seeing as many page time out problems with GoDaddy as I did a couple of months ago but I’ll certainly be looking at WP Super Cache 1.2 when it gets released.

I had some problems installing the updated version of JetPack (1.4.2) to my hosted WordPress blog a few days ago.

I tried the automatic install using the “Update Now” button but that failed and I got this error message under my dashboard after reloading/refreshing the admin page.

“An automated WordPress update has failed to complete – please attempt the update again now.”

The progress page you normally see when installing plugin’s would just stall for a long time and would not respond.

Not sure if the problem itself is specific to GoDaddy hosting but all I did to get JetPack to install properly was to deactivate the plugin temporarily then retry with a new install.

Don’t worry it won’t kill your previously accumulated stats!

Thought I’d share the above trouble-shooting tip as I haven’t found any guidance for this problem that recommends deactivating JetPack first.

Good Luck!