Moving Web Site = Not Fun

I've been having problems with 100 Megs Web Hosting for years. They've shut down housekeeping scripts that I set up on CRON jobs (and not told me they did it), they've shut down other scripts that they suspected of something, and finally last month they shut down my entire account. At that point I did two things: I pestered them until they turned the sites back on (which is basically the only way to get them to do anything), and then I did something I should have done years ago: opened a hosting account with APlus.net.

Quite some time ago I moved my domain purchasing to APlus from Go Daddy when Go Daddy started using sexually-charged advertising to grow its business. The reason I went with Go Daddy in the first place was because I knew the founder also created the Bible software I was using and loving at the time: QuickVerse. When the advertising started going the way it did, I realized that either the company had been sold, or the founder wasn't that big of a Christian in the first place. At any rate, I found APlus, and I was just about convinced to move my hosting there... and I would have, too, except for a few technical issues that were a problem. But, I figured, now was the time.

I hope I didn't jump too soon: APlus is spinning off their shared server hosting to a company called Hostopia.com... and forum posts seem to indicate that their customer service hasn't been the same quality as previously. My account wound up being one of the "not-upgraded-yet" accounts; I guess all of the hosting servers are being "upgraded" as part of the switchover, but I have yet to experience the new setup. I do know that the current setup is impressive, allowing the Webmaster to control a lot of things with the control panel that I had to do manually on my 100 Megs account. There are some things that are harder (such as accessing an external data source; because of their firewall setup you have to individually request them to open a port for each data source, by IP address!) but mostly things are easier, and there are multiple ways to get support (voice telephone, live chat, email).

I did want to document one thing. On my sites I like to let php parse my .html files; security by obscurity, although I don't particularly hide that I use php for my coding. php can be run either as a CGI or as an Apache module. On 100 Megs it was running as a module, btu on APlus they run it in CGI mode. It took me a day or two to get the syntax right in my .htaccess file. Here it is:

# CGI version
AddHandler x-httpd-php .html .htm .php
# Apache module version
#AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm .php

The hardest part, and something I ultimately had to find out from tech support because I didn't find it documented on the Web, was that the CGI syntax does not include "application/" on the name of the handler. Maybe this blog post will help somebody else out. Tech support recommended both the AddHandler and the AddType, but you should only need the one appropriate to the way php is running on your servers (although I don't imagine it would hurt to have both in place if you're nervous). I've commented out the AddType line with hash marks in my case.