GoDaddy's radical conservative solution

For many years I have been using GoDaddy hosting for some of my secondary projects. These projects do not require close attention to themselves, and therefore I do not particularly carefully monitor their performance - they live their quiet lives. Nevertheless, these sites are important to me, so the next trick of the hoster seriously upset me.

It should be noted that the sites hosted on GoDaddy have been developed for a long time - 5-6 years ago and were written in PHP4 .

The hoster seemed to me not bad, although it did not let me completely relax, but kept in tone the systematic (once a quarter) problems with the visibility of my projects. In such cases, I wrote to the support and the next day I received a smart answer like “Well, FIG knows, we looked - everything works for us. Look for jambs at your place. ” And really already worked. Once, for the sake of experiment, I decided to wait a week before turning to support. As a result, the sites were silent all this week, and a few hours after my letter to GoDaddy, they started working again. The response to the claim was a copy-paste of the previous ones. "Well, FIG knows ..." No regrets.

But this time GoDaddy outdid himself. Yesterday, I discovered that some of my sites behave strangely - for some from the main page it was impossible to go to sections and subsections (the purpose of the transition was passed through the parameter in the link), while for others there was also an error like “Call-time pass-by -reference has been deprecated " began to appear. It was not difficult to guess the reasons - there was something wrong with the PHP version on the hosting. I checked the suspicions by replacing some part of $ HTTP_GET_VARS and $ HTTP_POST_VARS with $ _GET and $ _POST, respectively. Earned. I looked at the PHP settings in the hosting control panel and found that nothing had changed there. One of three options is offered: PHP4 ,PHP5.2 and PHP5.3 . The first item is selected. I wrote to the support - the brave guys from support cheerfully replied that GoDaddy had already abandoned PHP4 since August 1 and all conservatives like me were cleverly transferred to version PHP5.3 . Excellent! Right move! It’s only strange that they didn’t reach me right away, but only by the beginning of September.

I thought I had missed some important warning letter from GoDaddy, but in my mailbox I found only notifications about debiting funds from the card and messages about discounts. Nothing about changing PHP versions. In the hosting control panel, too, there is no warning written in huge red letters. Googled - yeah, there was a message on the company’s twitter and explanations to surprised users in the support forum. Very cute.

The situation was corrected by creating php5.ini , writing only two lines into it (register_long_arrays = on; allow_call_time_pass_reference = true;)and restarting PHP. However, this is not a simple solution. The fact is that these bad people did not even explicitly warn about a change in the terms of the tariff plan. Is that right? Or am I missing something?

UPD In the comments, some ask what is the meaning of the post. I answer. I warn that GoDaddy has stopped supporting PHP4 . The hoster itself did not inform its clients about this and I do it for him. Older projects written in PHP4 and hosted by GoDaddy may fail. How to deal with some of them, I also wrote.

Everything else is a figment of your imagination. There are no hidden meanings. GoDaddy is one of the best hosting providers anyway. The bulk of the rest is generally quiet horror. Personally, I will leave him as soon as I have free time, but this is exclusively my decision. I do not impose anything on anyone. Yes, representatives of sexual minorities work exclusively in their support, but any support of any office in any country consists of the same specialists by 90%. Their staff is made up of low-paid, unskilled workers, often students. My opinion is that any caliper exists only for diverting eyes to show the customer care. From my experience, they have never independently solved a single problem that arose through the fault of their office. This works not only the support of the hosters, but any other.

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