Welcome to "The trouble with...." with your host, ZazzyBob.
Todays offering - "The trouble with letting other people host your website"
I use a certain web hosting service, who shall of course remain nameless here.
They are running PHP 4.3.10
I decide to write a script to test their PHP and set up some sessions, etc.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the code doesn't work - it doesn't error out or anything - it just doesn't work as tested.
I e-mail their support dept.
They blame my code "Bugs and stuff" is their response.
I've tested the code on PHP 4.3.1, PHP 4.3.10 and PHP 5.0.0 on various flavours of Apache 1.x.x and 2.x.x, on Windows and Linux systems. The code works fine. So how can it be a bug?!?!?
I can't stand unenthusiastic support personnel who can't be bothered to have a good look at customer problems. They seem to think "oh, it doesn't work - nothing to do with us - just write back Buggy code and he'll blame himself". No way Jose - this isn't my fault.
Two days before that - all CGI went down completely. Coincidence? Hmmm - we shall see. I'm not too pleased with "Company Foo" at the moment.
I know this is a bit of a nonsense rant - but I'm seriously considering setting up a dedicated web server in my DMZ and hosting the thing myself - the only plus side is they have good uptime, but hey.....
My spleen is vented now - let's go see if they've responded to my "No way Jose" e-mail yet !
Zazzybob - Remember to post back! I would like to know what they said. I have a friend here in atlanta that went through the same type of issue. He dropped the hosting company after a couple of annoying support calls....he never made any progress with them.
I'm not sure why you haven't, other than the bandwidth issues. I've been running my own webserver on a machine I built from a thin client, with a poor Cyrix chip and really can't complain much. I've gone on to build several decent low-traffic servers for my home useage, just port forwading them to various servers for different reasons. I run mine on SSL when possible too.
Not a lot! They seem to have gone very quiet since I last e-mailed them. I'll give it a few more days and then nag them again. I've got a lot of PHP I want to upload, but if simple sessions are not working properly on their server then what's the point?!
Bandwidth is the main issue - plus I'm going to be moving fairly soon and want to get that out of the way before I start concentrating on getting the various aspects of my LAN exactly how I want them.
Just to provide some closure on this whole saga....
I haven't heard back from my hosting providers for five days now. The PHP script (and sessions) still work totally fine on all my test systems. It still won't work on their server, however.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have rewritten what I was doing using Perl and cookies, and it works like a charm!
So that's that - if you want something fixed, fix it yourself.
