Recently, HostGator sent around some emails saying they were forcing a PHP upgrade to 5.4 in the coming weeks. The steps provided by HostGator are basically:
- Login to CPanel
- Go to PHP Configuration
- Change from 5.2 to 5.4
- See if your site works
I’m off work this week to work on my self-published book, so I went ahead and tried the PHP 5.4 upgrade. First, I made sure my sites were backed up and all WordPress plugins/themes were updated.
After running the PHP 5.4 configuration change, my site didn’t work. I received an HTTP 500 error with the cute alligator smiling his smug face at me. I’m on the current version of WordPress with everything (including my database) fully up-to-date. Naturally, the first thing I did was check the error logs in CPanel… empty. Next, I contacted customer support.
I was on with support for 1h 15m. At first, the support representative couldn’t see the internal server error page. She could run through kproxy.com and see my main page. I tried kproxy.com and saw my site, while other proxies and is-it-down-type checkers reported my site as being down.
After some time, we tracked down the following error message:
Cannot load the ionCube PHP Loader - it was built with configuration 2.2.0, whereas running engine is...
I was initially told this was a problem with my theme (which is the default theme with WordPress, btw). I was getting frustrated, but with the error message I was able to Google what would cause this and it turned out to be a php.ini issue. At first, I assumed it was the server’s php.ini causing problems. After about 5-10 minutes of the support representative investigating further, I loaded ~/www/php.ini from within my SSH session and found that the PHP configuration switcher in HostGator’s CPanel doesn’t modify php.ini in any way to account for the updated PHP version.
zend_extension="/usr/local/IonCube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so"
The fix for this whole problem was to change the version of IonCube used for script loading to match the version of PHP I chose in the PHP Configuration switcher. That’s really something that should be done automatically by a utility. Without error logs displaying in CPanel, I don’t know how the average customer is supposed to figure that one out.
Even after the day of downtime recently, I still give HostGator a 9/10. They’re always quick to respond to customer concerns and very nice. They resolve issues as quickly as possible and provide a pretty solid and affordable hosting environment.