Since I talked the first time to BlueHost costumer service and their technical support guys and I feel good with them. But I don’t know exactly what’s on the mind of hosting companies, and why they always change their hosting settings and play with databases options, and even edit files of our websites without further notice?!
What is symbolic link?
In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a special type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution.
Of course if you talk or chat with them they will tell you that they had to edit these files on all their costumers websites and you will got no meaningful answer like what happened with most of the people on discussion forums talking about this matter. I am just imagining the reaction of people who are not so much involved with coding and hosting problems, they just want to run their online business without problems, but there is no scape and sometimes there is no return!
Images on my Drupal website is missed up
Maybe you don’t know this, but our MMO Social Network is using Drupal platform, which considered the number one content managements system in the world, and the most high efficient platform for creating websites.
I notice image display problem yesterday on the website, I was about to pronounce the winners of our Making Money Contest and this problem put me down, I spend more than 4 hours trying to find why this happened, starting from checking the website settings, hosting settings, recent files modified and I found that my .htaccess has been changed!
I was having a backup of the website (thanks God), so I compared the new .htaccess with the old one using some online text comparing tool and found the differences between the two files, it was on the Symlinks link code, then I searched Google using the “Symlinks” keywords trying to find a fast solution and I found it on the Drupal discussion forum, it was an issue for all Drupal website, and everybody still talking about it and trying to discover and solve this problem.
How to fix Drupal .htaccess file and Symlinks problem?
To get your images to display again you need to edit /sites/default/files/.htaccess.
Change the line that says:
Options +FollowSymLinks
to be:
Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
What should business owners do to end hosting nightmares?
So now I can say, BlueHost is like GoDaddy and Hostmonster are like any other whatever hosting company when it’s about shared hosting service, they will give the right for themselves to change and edit your files without further notice or even any notification if they find something harmful specially host security, and this is what I don’t like because I earn from my websites and blogs, and I will not happy to wake up one morning and find everything missed up.
So I recommend moving to a dedicated server at the first chance if you run an online business and don’t want to run through this kind of problems.
Maybe you have a hosting story to share with us, let us know what happened and still happening with you and what is the best solution in your opinion to end hosting nightmares?
Tagged as: drupal forum, drupal problem, drupal symlink, drupal website, host security, host setting, making money online, soft link, symlink link













How are you Making your Business Amazing
Why You Should Choose Audio or Video For Your Podcast
How High Google Ranking is Like Taking Candy From The Baby
5 Reasons Why You Should Answer Your Readers’ Comments
Why Conversion Rate Optimization Is Important
The Blogging Language as I See it
How to Get 40+ Comments on Every Post
10 Simple Ways to Get Your Guest Post Rejected
10 Best Web Design Articles at MMO Social Network
Start a Real Estate website Today using ElegantEstate Wordpress Theme
A Million Votes for your Health
It Seems that Thesis 1.8 is Ready – Here are Thesis Theme Tutorials
Who am I to Criticize Anyone?
A Blogger’s Personality – 3 Personality Traits you Need to Succeed
Boost Your Business with Search Engine Optimisation
The Blogger’s Atlas
How to get an Affordable yet Professional Looking Logo for your Blog
New Design for CommentLuv Info Panel in this Sexy Version
When Is #1 Google Ranking Yours To Lose?
Time for Blogging to meet Design in a Business mode
How to Stand Out of the Crowd in Blogging Industry
Getting Rid of Ad Blasting Zombies Once and For All
Our FB Comluv Blogging Contest 20 Winners
Our Blogging Judges Team Play Important Role in our Contest
14 Design Mistakes That Could Cause Your Site to Fail
5 Key Steps To Boost Your Affiliate Commission
6 Reasons Why You Should Start A Blog Before You Start a Business
Give your Blog a Little TLD
Blogging – The Way to a Search Engine’s Heart?
Best 10 Blogging Articles at MMO Social Network
How I Promoted my Drupal Design Bookmark site through BuySellAds
The Downside of List Posts
Boost Your Blog Traffic With Google Trends
3 WordPress Plugins to Use When Doing Maintenance
Content IS NOT king… Relationship is
A Script Tells the Story of Publishing My First Post for A Famous Blog
How to Start a Blog in a Crowded Niche
Why Popup Domination is Increasing it’s Price
10 Killer and Effective Twitter Tips for Bloggers
Getting Your Readers Interact More with Your Blog




{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
(244 comments) February 3, 2010 at 11:17 am
Nope; never had an issue with Hostgator; been years now.
I do agree though, dedicated is the way to go if you can afford it.
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Welcome Aboard Part 2! All The Info You’ve Been Waiting For…
(29 comments) February 3, 2010 at 8:40 am
Interesting story Hesham. The hosting companies should be careful when they go about and change something. They should have notices about the changes up months before and even send instructions (or update their wiki or such) to help people prepare.
Some configurations and changes are needed, and often done to make things run better for everyone (not sure about this particular case), but good communication is the key. I’ve been happy with my host on this, and they’ve done a good job keeping the “backend” in order with regular updates – that haven’t broken anything

Antti Kokkonen´s last blog ..Blog Like an Expert in 31 Days
(235 comments) February 2, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Quite frankly my first experince with a hosting company was with 1And1 they were brilliant but the problem was similar you could tell when these tech guys mess with something and i move to godaddy they have a boring control panel no problem after almost a year but i think they are all the same glad to know that you have the issue sorted out but a dedicated server is the answer but the finance omes in to play.
lawmacs´s last blog ..Write For Readers And Design For Bots
(2694 comments) February 2, 2010 at 5:48 pm
it seems that all shared hosting services are nightmares!