Old hosting is back… sort of…

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 08:41pm

At some point over the last two hour period the server that was previously hosting my site started working again. This is good news as I can access the management tool which means I can access all of my data. The less than good news is that the support site for the web host is broken and there have been no other communications. It has been three days, there is no chance I’m going back.

Now I have the data back I could be uploading it to the new web host. I am not. Why? Because I am not sure I am happy with the new web host.

One thing I do that simplifies the development of any php site I make is to specify a directive in a top level .htaccess file to prepend a file to all of my php pages so I can automatically load common functionality. Then I can just use things like a function to output the page header without having to resort to the labourious act of adding an include line to the beginning of every page.

To have this work PHP needs to be loaded as an Apache module. My new web host does not do this, instead they use phpsuexec. While this looks like it is good for security it means that I need to place a php.ini file with the prepend directive in every single directory that has php files. I might as well just add the include to each file. Also the only information that I can find about phpsuexec isn’t very positive and one page I found from 2004 talked about it being end of life and suPHP should be used instead.

Fortunately there are dozens of web hosting providers offering cheap shared hosting. I will find one that simply loads PHP as an Apache module…

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