We’re always checking out new webhosting services. Not that the ones we DO use aren’t great, but there’s a bunch out there and the LAST thing we ever want to do is to put ALL those eggs in one basket. So today, I’m working on moving over some WordPress installations to ixWebhosting. I’m a huge fan of BackupBuddy. The goal is to move over a test site from Rackspace Hosting. Rackspace is cloud based which makes me very happy and it has it’s own set of caveats. Overall we’re very happy with Rackspace but I did find a difference or two between Rackspace WebHosting and ixWebhosting, so here goes…
ixWebhosting for WordPress
I did some preliminary testing with ix. They offer an “EasyApps” install of WordPress. It’s a single click install with pretty much a failsafe kind of setup. Nice. However, it ends up in a “http://domainname/wordpress/” URL which is not quite what I wanted. Now some of you out there (and those that probably took the time to read the FAQs will probably say “You can repoint it to answer without the /wordpress directory by…” I didn’t spend a whole lot of time hunting down the faq. Honestly I’m not planning on ever running more than WordPress in there, so there’s no real reason as far as I’m concerned for NOT installing it at root. And the EasyApps install doesn’t give you that option.
I’m a big fan of BackupBuddy so I moved over a clean image to setup on ix. Got errors right off the bat. Yes, the dreaded “WordPress White screen of death” – NOOOOOO! Well, I knew that the install was good as I pulled it from a working config on Rackspace. So, let’s troubleshoot.
Let’s enable PHP debugging in our .htaccess – I *don’t* see where I have access to the php.ini file, so we’ll try it out of the .htaccess file – add this code in.
# Displaying PHP errors
php_flag display_errors on
Ouch. Errors left and right. And it looks like something was asking for more memory and that call failed! Let’s boost up our memory in our .htaccess!
php_value memory_limit 64M
Crap. Nothing. Honestly… I had mucked about in this directory before, but this looked a little sad to start troubleshooting. Maybe enable debugging in WordPress would help. On to the wp-config.php file – let’s toss this in for grins.
define('WP_DEBUG', true); // Turn debugging ON
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false); // Turn forced display OFF
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); // Turn logging to wp-content/debug.log ON
Aha. All in One SEO pack causing issues. And a few others. Remove plugins mentioned in the wp-content/debug.log file. Removed the errors, but was still blanking.
Let’s try memory again… Still throwing memory allocation errors – maybe it’s NOT actually the plugins asking for something stupid – maybe still the memory. Let’s try adding our memory allocation in the WordPress config file – wp-config.php
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
And – voila we have action. Start putting back some plugins. So far so good. Still getting errors on All in One SEO, but the page now pulled without major issues.
Well, let’s compare the EasyApps install to see if this would actually be an issue on a quick auto install on ixWebhosting. So I installed the EasyApps version for comparison. There was NO define memory line as above in the stock install and it came up fine. BUT, let’s throw in our plugins. After just a few plugins, bam. We were down again with memory errors. Boosted up memory as above to define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '128M'); and we were up and running again. Nice.
Once I got beyond that, everything went very smoothly. Takes a little longer to import all the data into the mySQL server via BackupBuddy and several “Keep on importing” button pushes were required for moving over existing sites, but everything seems pretty decent.
So what’s the big difference?
Memory. And the way you make it available. Add your define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '128M'); into the ixWebhosting wp-config.php and you’ll be golden for WordPress!
And of course, if you have issues with your Raleigh WordPress website install, call Lizardwebs!!!
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November 28, 2012
Hey there! I am about to start my own blog and was wondering if you know where the best
place to purchase a blog url is? I am not even sure if that’s what its called? (I’m new to this) I’m referring to “http://blogs.lizardwebs.net/2012/01/ixwebhosting-setup-for-wordpress/”. Exactly how do I go about getting one of these for the website I’m creating?
Thanks alot 🙂
December 14, 2012
Hey Thurman. I believe you’re interested in a domain name more than anything. Actually what I prefer to do is to register my domain names elsewhere – GoDaddy for example. I know a lot of webmasters are NOT fond of GoDaddy as they do have a track record of yanking domain names from people that they suspect might be up to something on the shady side with nary a bit of proof or evidence, but… I like ’em.
If you have your domain directly with a registrar and then choose where to put your website, you get out of the “all in one” trap. Some places want you to do the “all in one” – buy a package that includes domain registration and hosting and other goodies on occasion. Once it’s all tied up like that, it’s sometimes difficult if you ever want to MOVE your website elsewhere. If you have your own domain registered where YOU can modify things, you can ALWAYS repoint your DNS settings to your new host without a lot of hassle.
March 12, 2014
I just wonder have ixhosting changed so that increasing memory in wp-config file doesn’t work. I am trying it and testing the results with a php test file.
It shows:
max_input_nesting_level 64 64
memory_limit 24M 24M
I tried changing the config file but it hasn’t worked.
March 18, 2014
It depends on the account type that you have. I have the SEO hosting account type and a Cloud VPS over at ix. Try dropping this into your .htaccess file. This is what I use on my shared hosting account. If there isn’t one showing, make sure you enable the show hidden files feature in your FTP client whichever one you’re using… I don’t know anything about the nesting piece, but pretty much anything SHOULD be possible. I spoke to their support people across the weekend trying to get the ionCube loader installed and they stepped me through setting up a custom php.ini via the cgi-bin. Pretty neat stuff! Good luck!
php_value memory_limit 128M