Fed up with WordPress, nothing works.

I don’t know much about your solution itself, but I do have GoDaddy hosting as well and I have no issues. I recently switched my account to their hosting type specifically for WordPess. Is that what you are using? That account flags themes and plugins that are not compatible with the current version of WP.

Some suggestions that people have given me in the past which may or may not help you (I’m no techie or expert) would be to change the theme and see if stuff works, also to disable plugins and see if stuff works. Other than that, I don’t have anything to offer.

I have always had good luck with GoDaddy support. Did you use their online chat or did you call? You get a human when you call so you may want to try that – or try again. Sometimes a different person at a company is better suited to help.

Good luck!

Hi Inov8coach

I appreciate your reply, thanks.
Yes I’ve spent about 150+ minutes over the last week talking to GoDaddy support staff. None of them know, they keep referring me here for support! I’ve tried changing themes as you suggested and disabling plugins but the issues remain.

Does WordPress actually have any admin support numbers you can call for technical issues or advice? It would be great if WordPress admin could let me know at least some possible solutions.

I’ll try to help you with a few points here too.

I just tried uploading a 63MB MP4 video

The isuse with this may not be only the file upload limits. There’s also server settings that contorl execution time, allowed processing memory, etc, and those also impact large file uploads. Under normal circumstances, unless you’re using a specialised large file uploading system (WordPress doesn’t offer this as standard at this point) you’re best off sticking ot a limit of 4-5MB for uploading files no matter what the settings are on the server. Anything over this can be uploaded using FTP which will transfer the files without a problem, but won’t have them show in the media library so you’ll need to know the URL’s to link to.

Some of my locally hosted MP4 videos simply do no stream

Most times that’s a server issue. Godaddy do have a history of not being great so I’d think that most times it’s something that is to do with them, but I doubt that their techs would know about it or acknowledge it.

Do MP4 files have to be AAC audio

Doing video via HTML, the way that WordPress does, is actually very hard to do. There’s several different encoding options, and not all browsers support any or all of them, so it can be very hard ot get it right for everyone no matter what you do. Under most circumstances if you want to have the video accessible to everyone it takes at least 3 different video files in different formats (MP4, WebM and OGV) in order for it to play everywhere, but there’s also different encoding settings within each of those formats, and that’s where it gets tricky. I’d suggest reading up on this as there’s way to much info on what to do out there then woudl fit into a post on here.

I want to just select a theme, press some buttons and everything just work.

Me too! I’d love that. The unfortunate truth is that no theme can ever work exactly the way that everyone wants it too. Unless you’re going to create a theme yourself to work to your own specifications, there’s always some tweaking or compromises that have to take place. That’s the same with every platform out there, and not only CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. it’s also with desktop software. Even Word and Excel have limitations where they don’t work for everyone, and they’re a lot bigger (and a whole lot more expensive) then wordPress is.

Haivng WordPress work the way that you want it to comes down to learning, training and modification. Learning is pretty easy as there’s a lot of info out there. Training isn’t bad as long as you get a reputable place or person to do it. The modification part is the hard part, and that’s where us developers come into it if people can’t do these things for themselves.

Hi catacaustic, I appreciate the time you took to reply.

I think you’re right that the issue may be on GoDaddy’s end because I tried drastically reducing the sizes of the video files (all now under 60MB) and they all uploaded via the WordPress Media Uploader and stream back fine now. I challenged GoDaddy the other day on this, I told them outright that I suspected they were throttling me and they were imposing server limitations on large file streaming but they denied this and said that I have unlimited bandwidth and so that couldn’t be it. I will probably do some further tests in a week or so by uploading the larger files again and seeing if they work and then I will go back to GoDaddy with the results. If they are indeed imposing such low server restrictions and not telling people about these restrictions so that people have no idea why things are not working then I think that is pretty poor practise.

I hear what you’re saying re MP4 files, codecs are evil and the absolute bain of our lives, one thing plays on one device but not another and there must be hundreds of the damn things all competing! This is one of those areas where competition is a bad thing, we need one standard that everything will play, like the MP3 standard. MP4 I thought was like that but having different encoding options and then the risk that certain browsers and devices don’t play them is unacceptable in my view. We should have one standard format and all developers write for it. Hopefully we’ll get to that point soon.

I guess I’m going to have to learn some basic CSS, HTML etc. if I want to make the most of my current website and template, I’d just rather not, not because it’s not interesting but because I really don’t have the time. I wish everything in WordPress was WYSIWYG and that there were easier ways to add borders around images and videos and other basic features without having to input code to achieve the result. But when it’s time for a bigger site, I’ll get a designer in, that’s for sure, no more buggering around for me.

Thanks.