jetpack – welcome to somewhereville (.com)

With hopes that this doesn't come back and bite me when something big breaks, a quick post to note that somewhereville.com is, after 23 years on interland.com (which I selected to go along with the land/ville theme way back when) and then web.com, now being hosted on greengeeks.com.

I can't speak to the actual numbers, but a number of us folk sitting on "legacy" services on web.com and checking their website umteen times a day had a very long mid-May when a poorly-planned php 7.4 to 8.3 upgrade brought websites offline for nearly two weeks (kicking and screaming into the future, as it were).

It went from horrible…

To bad…

To stuff I've seen plenty of times thanks to bad Jetpack updating…

To the point of at least seeing the site…

With that problem resolved, a historical restriction of 300 MB to MySQL databases for legacy accounts resulted in my being frozen out of my WordPress Dashboard for yet another week.

This locked-out issue had to be self-diagnosed because there were no red flags on the web.com support side (despite several asks), but a simple flipping on of WP-DEBUG in wp-config.php:

// Enable WP_DEBUG mode
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );

// Enable Debug logging to the /wp-content/debug.log file
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );

… produced the following:

WordPress database error: [INSERT, UPDATE command denied to user 'adminaccount'@'IP.IP.IP.IP' for table 'wp_wfConfig']
INSERT INTO wp_wfConfig (name, val, autoload) values ('lastPermissionsTemplateCheck', '1716472207', 'yes') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE val = '1716472207', autoload = 'yes'

WordPress database error: [INSERT, UPDATE command denied to user 'adminaccount'@'IP.IP.IP.IP' for table 'wp_wfConfig']
INSERT INTO wp_wfConfig (name, val, autoload) values ('serverDNS', '1716472207;407;209.17.116.160', 'yes') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE val = '1716472207;407;209.17.116.160', autoload = 'yes'

WordPress database error: [INSERT, UPDATE command denied to user 'adminaccount'@'IP.IP.IP.IP' for table 'wp_options']
INSERT INTO `wp_options` (`option_name`, `option_value`, `autoload`) VALUES ('_transient_doing_cron', '1716472208.0914690494537353515625', 'yes') ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE `option_name` = VALUES(`option_name`), `option_value` = VALUES(`option_value`), `autoload` = VALUES(`autoload`)

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /data/50/5/86/11/5086011/user/6116905/htdocs/swv/wp-includes/class-wpdb.php:1850) in /data/50/5/86/11/5086011/user/6116905/htdocs/swv/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 1435

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /data/50/5/86/11/5086011/user/6116905/htdocs/swv/wp-includes/class-wpdb.php:1850) in /data/50/5/86/11/5086011/user/6116905/htdocs/swv/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 1438

Which indicated an inability to write to the database. And how does a personal blog fill 300 MB of text with less than 200 posts over 23 years? And why was the sum total of my database under 100 MB when checking inside of phpMyAdmin?

Those are great questions. I asked those questions, and also asked why cnyo.org was sitting at 222 MB when my database backup file peaked at 8 MB.

The answer, from five different call/chat attempts, was MyTime Support – a pay service that offered the opportunity of getting reimbursed if the problem was legitimately web.com's, but which required forking over $59.99 for the privilege of a one-time call for an answer that any reasonable support service should have provided ("Thank you for letting me know. The My Time Support price for database issues is $59.99. Shall I add it for you?").

And that was the last plastic straw.

I looked at three hosting companies – dreamhost.com, nixihost.com, and greengeeks.com based on a bunch of frantic "We gotta get outta this place, if it's the last thing we ever do" searches. This was when I also learned about the animosity some folks have for the parent company EIG (? See wikipedia. Then take a look at reddit).

If you want to know, the primary selling point for the move to GreenGeeks was in the email. The catch-all email, to be exact. One of the perks of running your own domain name is you can have an email address for everything you want, meaning everything I sign up for can have its own email address associated with it (then let email client filters do the busy work for you. Either by selling or hacking, you'd be amazed where these custom email addresses end up over the decades). If you don't have a catch-all, and have been doing this for two decades, you risk having to remake N^M unique email addresses to get access to them all again. This might have forced staying with web.com (because providers don't much like the spam risk associated with this) and that took dreamhost and nixihost out of the running (according to official word from one instance of each of their chat supports. Your mileage may have varied).

Migration was almost flawless – on mine and GreenGeek's sides. They currently offer a free migration service, but it would have taken longer to find all the login information than just run UpDraftPlus (just the free version!) to backup my site on web.com and then restore it on greengeeks.com.

To make life easy, I decided to create a new WordPress site on GreenGeeks with their one-click installer and just restore my old copy with UpDraftPlus. I had an issue with the Default theme during the initial install, so picked a different theme from the one-click install list. When I initially created the WordPress site for my other moved legacy website cnyo.org and ran the restore from the Dashboard, my first visit ended as below:

Not ideal. And not ideal in 6 browsers, 3 machines, with and without a VPN turned on. A possible solution, as proposed by support, was a server-side cache clearing, as they would have cached the created site upon creation but not the migrated site upon initial migration (so I could get full access to the Dashboard, could go to most any other link on the site because the initial installation didn't have any links to play with, but would always land on the front page of the one-click install version until their cache was cleared out).

A clean-out on their side and I was good to go (which would have happened anyway, but not over the 15 minutes it took to diagnose and resolve).

Same problem with somewhereville.com – except the site loaded completely fine on the browser I was migrating in but not any other (?). 15 minutes and two quick chats and problem resolved. On the other hand, email hand-off from web.com to greengeeks.com was flawless and completed over the course of minutes (I didn't miss that one vital email that changed everything for me. Or whatever.).

According to GreenGeeks practices, I'm 300% green with GreenGeeks. I've got two kids now, so I have to think about these things. Also, the site and email are a hell of a lot faster than they were.

Having been burned a bit by the reduction in quality support over the last five or so years, and having played with the migration of cnyo.org hosting and email first (domain name transfer to another company and hosting to GreenGeeks) to see what the process would look like, I have learned a few important lessons about web.com in the process that I provide below if you hadn't had the pleasure (not unreasonable items for the time being):

do a chat first to get an official record of what you want to know and don't forget to copy + paste if problems/situations come up you're not happy with.
at least for web.com, where the support doesn't seem to keep a record of the times you ask questions unless it gets to the point of a ticket, ask three or four times on chat and by phone if you don't like the answer you're getting. Despite the training, some people will dig a little deeper than others and I had gotten out of three previous issues that they tried to throw at MyTime Support.
make sure your account is closed completely if/when you jump ship. I got an invoice for a forwarding service I thought was cancelled when they said "everything is closed" and had to call again to get my $2.34 back (and even more-so officially close the account).
Seven-year itch – I have the following from my chat when I called to close the account, but when I called to verify, the person on the other end knew of no such thing. Watch out for differing policies over two different mediums from the same company: "Unfortunately, due to tax reasons, we are required by law to keep your account open for 7 years from the last time logged in after all products were deleted. By keeping the account open, if there is ever an audit, we can provide you all necessary invoices and documents from the account. I can assure you moving forward, there should be no unauthorized charges as I already made sure that there are no active products and credit cards save in your account."
Domain name transfer is slow (5 days), but the updating of nameservers and propagation is fast (for me, 5 minutes to be getting email and website).
UpDraftPlus made the whole process very easy – I would have moved providers sooner if I'd known this. Once you create the brand new WordPress site, (1) the Restore overwrites the whole damned thing and (2) your wp-config.php doesn't need you if their one-click installer works right, so you don't need to know anything about your database or login credentials. If your provider offers a WordPress install option, jumping ship might be even easier than that.

A re-post from the CNY Observers website (www.cnyo.org).

Greetings fellow astrophiles,

CNYO has been anticipating our first observing session at Beaver Lake for this year, with the first of our two Spring dates (April 23rd) already clouded/snowed out. The forecast for April 30th hadn't looked too much better based on Monday estimates, leaving us to wonder if attendees would be stuck indoors with a lecture instead of outdoors with the rest of the universe.

I woke up early on the 30th to blue skies and a very bright Sun, certainly already exceeding the expectations of the past few days. But what of the afternoon and evening?

As I am prone to do on the day of an observing session, I headed right for the CNYO Cheat Sheet, where one can find the sky conditions for a large part of Central New York in the form of several Clear Sky Charts (CSCs – and, based on the different cloud cover at different locations, even begin to piece together how the skies at your location may change). The morning's CSCs are shown in the image below.

You will note that the bars to the far left (representing the morning) are not the dark blue squares that would indicate an almost cloud-less sky. As the red text at the bottom notes, sometimes the CSC images from a previous session are still sitting in your browser's cache and, to make sure you're looking at the newest data, you should hit Page Reload. Well, 5 or 10 of those didn't change matters at all. I clicked on the Downtown Syracuse image in order to see what the actual CSC website said about today. An almost perfect band of dark blue – prime observing weather (when the wind is mild, that is).

So, what happened?

The first clue came when I right-clicked on one of the images in order to see just the image in my browser. When you do this, you should see something like: cleardarksky.com/c/SyrcsNYcs0.gif?1

What I saw for the link was the following: i1.wp.com/cleardarksky.com/c/SyrcsNYcs0.gif?1

Something is afoot in Bootes.

A quick google search indicated that the i1.wp.com (which might also be i0.wp.com, i2.wp.com, maybe more) site is, in fact, an image (maybe other) repository for wordpress.com that is supposed to speed up your page downloading process (by being faster than the same image you might load somewhere else) and is called upon, specifically, by Photon – one of the functions built into Jetpack (itself a large suite of plugins for WordPress that very generally make my life much easier by providing Site Stats, Contact Forms, etc.). That said, this is no good for the Clear Sky Chart, as you don't know how many days ago that i1.wp.com image was saved (and it clearly ain't today's!).

To disable this feature (if it was turned on, anyway), go to your WordPress Dashboard and click on Jetpack on the right-hand side.

At present, Photon is the first clickable item at upper left. Click on "Photon" to reveal the following image:

Click on Deactivate and go back to your Clear Sky Chart-containing page:

You'll note that the Clear Sky Charts are fixed (revealing an excellent day for Solar and Night Observing) and you'll also see that the NASA/SOHO image is different, the SWPC/NOAA image is different, and event the Wunderground logo is different. Quite the site fix!

If you have the same problem, I hope the above fixes it. If you know of a site running the Clear Sky Chart and it doesn't reflect what you see outside, let the site admin know.