Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

9 posts by 6 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: June 30, 2011   (RSS)

By zip222 - May 27, 2010

Today I received a call from one of clients letting me know that their site was completely blank. I looked into it and what I discovered is that the Program Directory had been changed which resulted in the require_once that appears at the top of every page failing immediately.

Why would a hosting company change this? Has anyone experience this before? The host is Earthlink.

Re: [zip222] Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

By gkornbluth - May 27, 2010

Hi zip222,

No, I personally never did, but hosting companies do strange things when they update their systems.

Is it possible that someone at your client inadvertently did something and might not even know that they did it? (That's happened to me before.)

Or that someone has hacked your hosting space.

To be on the safe side, I'd suggest at the very least that you change your passwords , and I'd ask Earthlink to check into the issue.

I'm sure that others have other ideas as well.

Best,

Jerry Kornbluth
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Re: [zip222] Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

By Dave - May 27, 2010

Hi zip222,

Yes, we've seen that before, and it's very annoying. Being who we are we usually get the call when web hosts break things. It doesn't happen too often but we've seen it. Lots of programs use hard coded paths so if they change their directory naming it can break lots of things.

If you use relative paths for your require_once lines they'll be more portable. Something like this:

require_once "cmsAdmin/lib/viewer_functions.php";

or to go up one directory:
require_once "../cmsAdmin/lib/viewer_functions.php";

You'll still want to go through and check the other settings. Also you might want to ask you host why they changed it or if they can make the old path work as well. Usually they can make both the old and new paths work by creating a symbolic link from the old to the new.

Hope that helps!
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

By nburkha1 - June 8, 2010

Hi-
One of our clients just had the same problem with earthlink changing the server path, causing blank pages.

How do we change the "Program Directory" path listed under General Settings? Is it necessary to update this if the settings.dat.php file has been changed to reflect the current path? The system seems to be working.

Re: [nburkha1] Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

By Donna - June 9, 2010

Hi there,

You'll never need to change the Program Directory -- that's the directory that CMS Builder detects automatically that it's in, so that will update if it ever changes.

You may need to update your paths in your created PHP pages, as Dave mentioned above.

I hope this helps. :)
Donna

--
support@interactivetools.com

Re: [Donna] Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

By zip222 - June 10, 2010

Yes, that's what I had to do. Fortunately it's a fairly small site and it only took a few minutes. I spoke with Earthlink about this and they "promised" it would never happen again. Yeah right! How can someone working in customer support make that statement? My guess it that this is standard procedure for them.

Re: [Keltam2] Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

By Dave - June 30, 2011

Hi Kelly,

Sometimes hosts are setup in such a way that they have multiple different filepaths that point to the same place.

From the looks of the error my guess is you're doing this:
include_once("/spambot-email-protector.php");

When you want this:
include_once("spambot-email-protector.php"); // no leading slash

The leading slash makes it look in the root of the server for the file. Same for require_once, try removing the leading slash.

I can't tell for sure, though. If you want to attach the horesforsale.php file I could take a look for you.

Hope that helps!
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

By Keltam2 - June 30, 2011

Perfect - that was what it was! thank you for your help!!
Kelly