Tong Family

Well it’s a long story but I’ve loved Bluehost for 15 years. And before that it was my buddy at another hosting company whose name I’ve actually forgotten. Imagine hosting?

But last week things finally broke and I’m so mad at myself for not having a hot backup. It’s a strange subtle bug but basically in the root site, Apache is not honoring the AddHandler to switch to a new php version properly. It is using a php file for the installed PHP in /etc/php/php.ini whereas it should use one in the cpanel dynamic list.

This isn’t a problem in any subdirectories of ~/public_html but just the root. I’ve got a level 2 request in.

Why do I need to do this. Because the core php is an old 5.2 and living to at least 5.6 is essential. Ideally to 7.3. WordPress 5.2 no longer supports 5.2 which causes the issue. And yes this really want me to have a dockerized WordPress long term or even use ghost to create a static site that I can check in (thanks Todd for that wisdom).

Right now the old tongfamily is on 4.9 with php 5.2 and no longer accepts new posts. Sigh.

But I’ve learned don’t do two things at once so the first thing is to take the current WordPress and duplicate.

But it spurred me on to do a hot backup with another hoster. Long term richtong.com will point to bluehost and richtong.org to digital ocean. That’s what you are reading right now.

It’s a single droplet (their virtual server) with a wordpress image on it. Not quite working yet are the connection to WordPress.com. I think there’s an xmlrpc block that the security plugin is doing. But progress.

Bear with me as I move the dns configuration to digital ocean and figure out the Apache configuration. Then hopefully I’ll get a fix from bluehost and I’ll be stable with two running WordPress systems on two different hosters 🙂

And when that works I can experiment with dockerized/kubernetes deployment, using git to manage revisions and generating a JAM site (Ed static html as the output rather than a dynamic site with a database behind it.