Whipped Cream Difficulties

I was busy over the weekend and didn’t have a chance to follow-up with Bluehost. I was planning to do so tonight…

…but Bluehost emailed me! The direct message I sent this morning to Sachin Puri (“CEO @ Bluehost Group”) asking whose leg I had to hump to get some action on this ticket may have been a factor in that.

Summarizing, Bluehost’s latest theory is that: “a script is being terminated due to execution time limits, specifically during image processing handled by WordPress”. Which is actually a reasonable theory, and explains some things: if the script is being terminated because it takes too long to run, there’s probably a connection to server load, and that would explain why some people see the problem intermittently.

Options to Resolve

Resize images before uploading to reduce processing time. (recommended)

Disable image resizing via a plugin

Consider upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated plan, where you have full control over PHP limits and resource usage.

I’m not really interested in adding an “image resizing” step to my workflow, especially when this worked in the past without that step. I’m also not really interested in paying more money to get back to where I was.

Next Steps & Suggestions

To further isolate the issue, we recommend:

Retry the upload using WordPress to confirm if the problem persists on your end.

Which I would love to be able to do. But as I’ve mentioned to my readers, and as I told the Bluehost support rep, they’ve set the maximum file upload size for this instance to ZERO BYTES.

Today, my blog is old enough to drive.

At least with a provisional driver’s license in the state of Texas.

It was a busy weekend. I’ll have some more updates later. But how about a musical interlude?

And speaking of Tennessee Ernie Williams, this sounds like one of the upper circles of Hell to me. But I can’t pass up the opportunity to quote the phrase used in the NYT headline, “Tennessee Williams on ice”.

At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis’s “The Gig,” a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called “Moise and the World of Reason.” As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm.

I contacted Bluehost last night to follow up on my ticket.

They claimed they emailed me a status update, which I never received. (Yes, I checked my junk and spam folders.)

They also claimed that I needed to delete some “malware infected” files. The specific ones they cited were:

/home4/sportsg3/public_html/500.php
/home4/sportsg3/public_html/sdclog/500.php

I looked at those files. They looked like standard HTML files displaying a “500 Internal Server Error”. I saw no evidence that they were infected in any way. But Bluehost support refused to proceed until I deleted those files and a “security scan” came back “clean”.

Now that I’ve done that, I’m waiting for an update from Bluehost support. Which I probably won’t get, as they keep claiming to send updates that I don’t get. (They are sending the updates to the admin address with Bluehost, which is also where the chat transcripts (that I am getting) go to.)

In the meantime, I talked to Siteground. They offer everything Bluehost does, and will even do a professional migration of all of my WordPress instances from Bluehost to their hosting. Even better, the first “professional migration” is free, and ones after that are reasonably priced. And their chat rep was pleasant and seemed knowledgeable. (Of course, I don’t know if they were sales or support.)

This may be the way I end up going.

It has been close to 24 hours since Bluehost “escalated” my case.

I still can’t upload photos, and Bluehost has made no attempt to contact me: I’ve checked my email, including the junk and spam folders.

That doesn’t mean, however, that someone hasn’t been working on my blog.

I discovered when I went to write today’s obit watch that Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) had disabled all my plugins. Including the one that disables the WordPress block editor, and the spam filtering plugin. Which were the only two I had enabled. Yes, disabling plugins is a good diagnostic step, but once you’ve run the diagnostics, shouldn’t you put them back?

And I think I know why I can’t upload images, not even small ones, at least at the moment: someone set the “Maximum upload file size” to “0 B.” Yes, zero bytes. Additionally, there are about five images in my media library that weren’t there before, and are duplicates of images previously uploaded.

I’m going to give Bluehost another 24 hours to fix the problem before I ask for a status update. That’s 48 hours.

File uploads still do not work. At least, not consistently, and not in a way that I can tolerate.

Sometimes (maybe 30% of the time) I can upload a file, and it appears to work. I can see the file in my media library. I can insert it into a post. But it’s a 50/50 crapshoot whether the file actually displays when I save a draft and preview. Most of the time, I get one of these entertaining error messages:

Screenshot

Screenshot

Screenshot

Yes, these work, but they are very small scren snapshot files. None is over 1 MB in size.

After another half-hour in chat with Bluehost support:

Screenshot

I have to give this support rep props, though: at least he acted on my escalation request the first time. The support rep on Sunday repeatedly refused to escalate.

I still can’t upload files.

Bluehost support claimed yesterday, after 2 1/2 hours on the phone, that they had fixed the problem. It worked for a very short time today, but it has gone back to the same errors I was seeing yesterday.

The workaround that they provided also failed with a cryptic “AJAX” error when I tried using it.