H3RALD: Beware of sudden upgrades!

Beware of sudden upgrades!

h3rald — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:41:00 -0700

Yesterday I got a rather annoying early Christmas present: when visiting my site, I noticed that the raw source code of my dispatch.fcgi file (yes, I’m on shared hosting with FastCGI, for now) was displayed “as it is” instead of being interpreted.

After the initial moment of anger and stress (I immediately realized it was BlueHost’s fault, not mine), I opened two tickets and went to bed, hoping to see everything solved in the morning.

Unluckily it wasn’t the case, so I posted on BlueHost forum trying to be as polite as possible complaining because the issue wasn’t being dealt with. It turns out that for such issues you’re supposed to use the “Live Chat” feature instead of the tickets, so that’s what I did.

After a quick chat with “Christian”, it turns out that BlueHost decided to perform a server upgrade “silently” upgrading to Apache2, PHP5, MySQL4.1, etc. etc. Cool, pity that nobody told me that!

I was expecting some sort of PHP upgrade (not that I care like that), which was supposed to happen according to the last BlueHost newsletter:

“To alleviate any issues in the future with certain scripts that only run on one version of PHP we have developed the ability to run PHP4 and PHP5 on the same server simultaneously. This will be rolled out to all users in the next couple of weeks. Some servers already have this ability while most will see it in the next two weeks.”

But… hang on? Does it say anything about migrating to Apache2? I don’t think so! What’s worse, is that quite a few things changed with Apache2, in particular the way FastCGI handlers are declared:

# Apache 1.3:
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

# Apache 2:
AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi

See? Different. This is due to the fact that mod_fcgid is used instead of mod_fastcgi on Apache 2.

The fix was easy, of course, and now my site is up and running again (and actually running faster)… but, I wonder, why the hell wasn’t I informed? Is it acceptable? It sounds like I might end up on a VPS sooner than expected, unless BlueHost doesn’t roll out some new exciting feature soon, as I think it might…

"Beware of sudden upgrades!" by dfavre

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:16:07 -0700

Thanks! This solved a long-standing problem that I’ve had with my site.

My only problem with BH is the way they handle upgrades on their shared hosts. I’ve had my RoR app go offline several times due to upgrading the Rails version on my server without notice.

"Beware of sudden upgrades!" by J Cooper

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:53:54 -0700

Thank you! This saved me too! Stupid bluehost :(

"Beware of sudden upgrades!" by t12345

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:55:43 -0700

slicehost.com VPS is much better but it takes long time to install everything by yourself. Bluehost completely ignored my cries for help so I had no other choice.

"Beware of sudden upgrades!" by Fabio Cevasco

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:38:37 -0700

Wow, looks like I was lucky! The guy I spoke to was smart enough to figure out the problem in less than 3 minutes, I must say.

@t12345: Out of curiosity, which VPS host are you going for?

"Beware of sudden upgrades!" by t12345

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:28:35 -0700

My Live chat session was not that helpful. I have checked everything the support guy asked me to but instead of providing any suggestion he dumped a long message explaining how pointless was talking to me and closed the session. I moved to VPS, no more Bluehost for me.

"Beware of sudden upgrades!" by Teju

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 15:30:22 -0700

Your post saved my site….thanks! Bluehost generally rocks, but they’ve disappointed this time.

You’re luckier than I am – my live chat guy (Dave) told me that the addhandler problem was my ‘website design issue’ and he couldn’t help me.