They just suspended one of our sites without warning. It’s paid until June. It has very little traffic so can’t be overusing resources. Seriously, CoolHandle.com, if there’s something wrong on the site (used as spam gateway), a warning email first would allow the issue to be addressed. As it is if there is something going on then I can’t fix it as the site is down.

Another host on my ‘don’t use’ list.

… Read the rest

A user reported they couldn’t leave comments and got this error:

Error 403

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wp-comments-post.php on this server.

You do not have permission to access this server. Before trying again, close your browser, run anti-virus and anti-spyware software and remove any viruses and spyware from your computer.

Your technical support key is: 446e-6a26-b40c-8ddc

You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact >webmaster at sitename and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.

This looks related to Bad Behavior plugin as the technical support link goes to ioerror.us.… Read the rest

Had an issue with one site these past couple of weeks where a Google Analytics experiment was not collecting data even though Google Analytics was saying it was set up correctly.

One of the issues noted elsewhere was that the site set up for cross-domain tracking. For instance if the main site was www.topsemtips.com and the completion (sales) page was on secure.topsemtips.com then you have to set up analytics to know the two sites are interrelated using code similar to:

pageTracker._setDomainName(“topsemtips.com”);

Which some one else mentioned needed the additional code

Added above the experiment code. However this didn’t work.… Read the rest

Just had a 3 year renewal invoice for a shared host account from Network Solutions and the cost was $411. We have a number of hosting accounts with many companies and this is one of the most expensive I’ve heard of for shared Linux hosting. I found somewhere to host the site for $22 for two years. This saves $126 per year in hosting – $252 for two years and if extrapolated to 3 years it saves a whooping $378 over three years.

So I moved the site (took less than one hour) and went to cancel the account with Network Solutions.… Read the rest

We recently transitioned our website from a VPS (virtual private server) to the Amazon AWS cloud environment. Benefits include more control of your server and usually less cost. The major drawback is you need to run the server yourself so some basic Unix knowledge is necessary.

The transition itself was very straight forward consisting of the following steps:

• Purchase Amazon EC2 large instance, this provides enough CPUs and memory to run a full LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). If you don’t need a database then using a medium will work OK.
• Ensure you provision enough disk space for your software, database and for backups.

I looked around for a simple Contact Form 7 phone validation however all the solutions I found relied on hacking the Contact Form 7 code. By looking through the CF7 code I found a way to attach a simple function to the validation to allow custom validation of any input type you like

To plug into the Contact Form 7 validation there are some filters you can attach to. The built in validation functions do this so we’re copying the standard CF7 way of validation.

All of the code given here can be put into the functions.php file in your wordpress theme.… Read the rest

Sometimes a poor setup for wordpress can cause the site to return a blank screen. If you try accessing through /wp-admin/ and it still returns a blank screen then there are generally three causes:

1. A broken .htaccess file
2. A broken theme
3. A plugin causing issues

Go through the following steps to fix this issue:

1. Try removing the .htaccess in the root directory and see if the site works
2. Remove the main theme directory (using FTP access) and see if the site works.
3. If this fails turn off your plugins (by deleting them using FTP if you can’t get in through wp-admin) and again see if the site works.

Had this issue on one site when running Chrome and after much hunting did not find a documented solution. However I did manage to find and correct the issue after a little playing with my code.

The issue ended up being a totally unrelated