Luthiery Laboratories

Web hosting is not what it used to be. Unstable servers, insane server caching policies, and tech support that only makes things worse.

The last few days have been awful. This is clearly an old server, and PHP crashes regularly, resulting in an "Error 500" code. PHP usually recovers itself after ten minutes or so, but a couple of days ago, it crashed and stayed down. This time I determined it was the database server, because another PHP site came back up, but not this one, and the difference between the two is that this uses a database and the other does not. Anyone with common sense can figure these things out.

After an hour, I logged in to tech support and started a chat. Bluehost's low-level tech support people are earnest and friendly and really can't fix anything. They can make it all worse though, and that's what they did. They'll blame your code, and make all sorts of changes that just compound the problem until it becomes intractable. When all of their well-meaning destruction fails to fix anything, they promise to kick it up to the next level, where you'd think people might actually know something.

I've administered a small fleet of these servers in the past, and I probably know more about them than the script-kiddie on the other end of the chat. Eventually, I ended up fixing everything myself. I carefully undid all the damage that 'tech support' did, and with some good luck the server recovered itself after a few hours. Or more likely, someone looked at it and fixed it after I complained, but they will never admit that. Oh, did I mention that tech support lies? A lot. But in a very nice and friendly way. It's best when they lie to you right away, it saves a lot of time.

This morning I uncovered a final piece of tech support shrapnel that was lodged in my website - a small php.ini file that dates to exactly when I first called tech support and contains a lot of wrong settings. I knew the problem was PHP all along, and there it was - installed by technical support. A few days earlier they made such a mess of the .htaccess file that nothing would load until I installed a clean one from a backup. It's dangerous to allow low-level tech support to do anything at all.

All of these problems begin with a server that is simply unreliable. PHP crashes randomly, and the database server can't be trusted either. But the real problems begin when you let tech support start messing with things. Their attempts to fix things left everything corrupted. DO NOT let low-level tech support touch your code or your configuration when you know the problem is upstairs. And none of the damage they did, did they undo when it didn't work - they left it all in place and went off and tried something new. Script-kiddies who have no idea what they are doing. I had to clean it all up myself.

I changed the name of the bad php.ini file so it won't load, and now everything seems to be right. Fingers crossed. This server is still a piece of crap, and I expect further crashes until it finally dies, but hopefully no repeat of the last few days. Needless to say, I keep local backups of everything. I wouldn't trust them to do that right either.

In the final analysis, I fixed everything myself, including the extra damage done by tech support. They fixed nothing, they only compounded the problems. Sadly, there really is no alternative to BlueHost - almost every other company out there is the same outfit, operating under a different name. And that is the sad state of web hosting nowadays - it has really gone to hell.

On the plus side, the contact form is now entirely my own code, so that's one less lousy WordPress plugin booby-trap. I tried a lot of plugins, and they were either over-done or under-done. Mine is just right, and now built into the theme, so it can't be accidentally disabled.

I also figured out another nagging WP issue, no thanks to WordPress' lousy documentation. There is no help there - you need to search far and wide to find real answers. But you're probably not the first person to have any particular problem, and if you search hard enough, you can find answers, or at least clues. In fact, it was a small clue that led me to the php.ini file, which wasn't there three days ago.

I feel better now after all that ranting. Here is the new contact form, which I can place anywhere I want with a few keystrokes:

Just want to say Hello? Sign the .

Notice how it has Captcha, and the image is not impossible to read. Captcha doesn't really work anyway, the newest bots can read through it. But if you make it hard enough, it will certainly stop human beings !!! I think this is a good compromise.