Blog Marco

ARRRRGGGHHHH!!! I hate moving to new hosts. Something always goes wrong. Maybe it's me. So here's a venting blog entry about my recent ordeal with a Drupal Installation on HostGator which I just solved a few minutes ago. Call it a debrief on my experience and see what lessons I can learn from my mistakes. There isn't anything wrong with HostGator. I realise now what I was doing wrong.

I always go about Drupal installations systematically. Actually I wasn't leaving my long time hosting service (MediaTemple). I just wanted another host and wanted to try out another service (and also to use them as a backup, in case anything happens).

So I sign up to HostGator (which was painless except for the hip pocket - although their hosting prices are competitive). I bought a new domain name from GoDaddy and another from a company called IntaServe which offer registrations for *.com.au's. I've had experience with GoDaddy before - so that went smoothly - although for the uninitiated - you'll probably get lost in the jungle of promotions that they have. I'm slightly annoyed with Intaserve. I guess that's where my attitude started down a downward spiral. I came into the new project all optimistic and now this Australian registrar is screwing my workflow. Why? Because their business systems are screwed. I think they need to have a look at their registration systems: just a few tweaks with their wording in their emails and automated systems and they would be really good. But no, it took me a while, emails to Intaserve took a while to get answered. I was emailing HostGator at 11pm on a Sunday night in Australia and I was getting a response from them. So I had to give Intaserve a call to fix things. In five minutes the pain was all over. Thank God I don't have to deal with Intaserve again until the next time I need to renew my domain.

Ok, so I've got HostGator now and a new Domain. Now for the Drupal Installation. I didn't want to use Fantastico (automated install of Drupal) because (1) they only offered version 6 which at the moment doesn't have many modules ported. (2) I wanted to use a custom installation to my needs.

Next, I took a current Drupal installation from another hosting company and uploaded the files onto the directory. I had to play around with the "add-on domain" for a while, which wasn't working 100%. I created the MySQL database + user and imported my tables. I changed the settings.php with the database settings. I went to the registrar and I changed the nameservers.

And clicking on the domain - it doesn't work. It spits out "500 Internal Server Error". I do a search on google for "Drupal Installation HostGator" - and then I find a whole heap of negative reviews for using Drupal on HostGator and only a few positive which swear having no problems with Drupal Installations on HostGator. I read around and I tweak php.ini and .htaccess about 10-20 times. Still no luck. I give HostGator a call using Skype (FreeCall). I got to an operator within 2 rings. (This was about 8pm Australian time which is 6am New York time). She tried to help me but no luck after about 5 minutes - she told me to send an email to support@hostgator.com.

I didn't give up on installing my old Drupal website on Hostgator. So I wanted to test if it were actually possible to install Drupal on HostGator. I then installed the Fantastico Drupal Version 6. It worked. Then I SSH'ed onto a different add-on domain folder and ungzipped it and hit the install.php page. (Oh yeah I had to setup the database and settings.php) It installed Drupal 5.7! Okay.... so what Am I doing wrong?

Here's the final step for solving my problem with installing Drupal on Hostgator: I ungzipped a fresh set of files of Drupal 5.7 and I overwrote all my other files on the original domain which I was having all the problems. And guess what? problem solved! Must have left out a file or corrupted a system file - who knows? but everything is working now.

Now for those who may get the same problem as I am with my HostGator install of Drupal here are some of the errors I got:
"500 Internal Server Error" and in server error logs "Premature end of script headers" "SoftException in Application.cpp:238: File is writeable by group" Here's another guy moving his Drupal site to HostGator. I explored the possibility of some conflict or missing line on php.ini or the .htaccess file. I also explored the possibility in changes of one host using PHP 4 and the conflict of moving it onto PHP5 which HostGator has.

Anyway I'm happy with HostGator so far. I don't know what everyone else is fussing on about.

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