Great first troubleshooting experience for a new HG customer

[DorotheaMordan]

Hello All,
I was asked by HG to post my recent feedback to this forum. In the scenario I describe below there are two ZenCart stores mentioned, my store – chandlerdesignslimited.com/store which is live and my client's store which I have titled “Client's Site” as it is not live yet.
To preface my story I would like to let the readers know that as a reseller/web site designer my niche in the market is to teach my clients how to understand the internet triangle of hard drive to remote server to viewer and thus better manage their web content and presentation. When I work with a hosting company and their tech support my philosophy is that I play a part in creating the situation and thus I play a part in finding the solution(s). And as someone, like many working online, who trained originally in other disciplines, figuring out what is happening to my files is a challenge I enjoy.
The reasons I chose HostGator a few months ago to switch my sites to was 1. that they have the array of services I need and are consistently in the top 10 – 20 on all of the ratings sites I studied (a dozen or more) 2. wind powered energy and 3. 24/7/365 phone support. I have been fortunate to not ever need to leave a hosting company for any other reason than they were taking their services in different direction than I want to go. I can not emphasize enough though that I take equal responsibility with my vendor for knowing what is going on with my files and the system they are stored on, thus it is a prerequisite for me that I have good communication with my vendor. I have confidence that the staff at HG is willing and able to sort out the technical issues that will arise.

Start of feedback comments:
Good Morning Host Gator,

I had a tech support phone call about this with Gene on this last Monday or Tuesday 5/3 or 4. This feedback is to let you all know what I found out about the original problem & to please let Gene know how it all turned out.

The problem/symptom:
Admin area of a “Client's Site” ZenCart store could not be accessed after hostgator migrated the site content from previous host. I placed one call before Gene and spoke with Aaron G and found that because the site had been on a windows server and was moved to a linex server there were a couple of settings in one of the documents which needed to be changed. That was fixed but I still could not access the store admin area. All through this the public URL for the store was displaying the store. Aaron and I figured that prior to the above fix it was still pointing to the previous database. And after it pointed to the db on Hostgator.
We still could not access the admin area but we ended the call as we decided that I should just do the current upgrade to fix the problem.

However, I needed to change a few settings to perform the upgrade so this had to be worked around.
So that brings me to my call with Gene where I used my store at chandlerdesignslimited.com/store to test the upgrade process (this was moved from a linex server and did not have access problems but it had other issues).
Gene took me through the upload process for the database zip file & extraction and explained that the permission setting is 755 not 777 on the HG system-THIS WORKED and solved most of my issues.
I successfully upgraded my zencart store and yesterday got back to my “Client Site”, which I completed last night. The tech calls did not answer these problems directly but Gene and others I spoke with gave me the troubleshooting tools I needed to solve the rest of the problems. Thanks!

Here is what I found in the ZenCart area of my “Client's Site” :
One of the directories on my “Client's Site” had not migrated (an "init_includes" directory, can't remember which one but I now know how to find from an error message!). There were a few other files which seem to have not made it through your migration process but this one was the one which kept us from logging on to the admin area. I also found that I had to pay closer attention to the database naming conventions of cpanel. There are not many configuration.php setting to change while upgrading, testing & renaming a shopping cart but they are of course specific.

Short list of what your customers might not be aware of:
Different servers need different settings
permission setting 755
Migrations need to be checked at the back end as well as the url in a browser

Working around these issues was not hard once I knew what each problem was, finding the problem was the time consuming part.

So this is resolved as far as what I needed to learn and two of my upgrades are complete. I have one more client store to do - wish me luck!
Please pass along to Gene and Aaron my thanks for helping me with this.

End of comments


Dorothea Mordan,
chandlerdesignslimited.com

TeachAManToFish.us

[GatorJoshL]

Dorothea,

Thank you for the review, I will make sure Gene and Aaron both see this.

If you need anything at all we are here 24x7.

Thank you,