404 page – a fasthosts error?

It may also be worth mentioning that Fasthosts told us the following:

“The issue you are experiencing with WordPress is due to an incorrectly configured error page.

The page can be found in your htdocs folder and at the url https://www.shcl.co.uk/error_page.php

For some reason the error_page.php is not picking up styles and headers and from the looks of things, footers.

This is certainly a scripting error and should be addressed by the WordPress technical support.”

There is no such page at “https://www.shcl.co.uk/error_page.php”? When you go there through a browser it is bouncing to the faulty 404 re-direct.

Any help would be much appreciated…

Hi Matt –

I’m afraid I don’t have a solution (yet) but I am working on exactly the same problem (see https://www.blogobeer.com/404).

I’ve been in touch with a chap called Dale at Fasthosts support and he suggested that the problem may be to do with the way WP uses the line

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

in the .htaccess file – which (although I’m no expert) seems to be something to do with the control of Permalinks.

The same problem is happening across every WP site I have hosted with Fasthosts (and there are a few) and I think is something to do with the way they manage their custom error pages. I know it’s a FH-specific problem because I have another WP site hosted with DataFlame (although, ironically, I’m in the process of moving it over to Fasthosts…) and the error page works perfectly there.

Alas, though, my technical knowledge is limited, so I’m kinda stuck at this point. But if anyone else out there with more knowledge of the inner workings of the permalinks, .htaccess files etc. can shed any light, it would be much appreciated!

Thanks Darren,

I also have narrowed the issue down to the .htaccess file. The complication is that the rewrite rule is an essential element of WordPress it seems (I’m no expert in server side scripting either). Has anybody got the 404 working whilst being hosted with Fasthosts?

Hi Matt –

Dale at FH has managed to get a couple of the FH engineers to look into the problem from their end and he’s asked me to post a more detailed spec of the problem here – which I’ll do shortly – in case anyone with a bit more in-depth knowledge of the workings of either WordPress or server management has any ideas…

But no actual solution just yet, no. I have pointed out though, that if FH gets a rep for being non-WP friendly it could put a lot of potential customers off their hosting packages, so I think they’re taking it seriously. Dale certainly is.

DT

I believe they should take it VERY seriously!

I got this back from Fast Host:

“Dear Sir / Madam,
Thanks for contacting us with your support enquiry.
Unfortunately we do not have a solution to this as it is not something that we can support.
Due to the way that our servers are configured to handle error pages, it is not compiling with the way that wordpress handles its 404.
Wordpress has the 404 load from a style sheet in a sub directory where our servers are set to read customer error pages on the root directory.
Due to this we are unable to help and you would need to try and get in touch with wordpress to work out an alternative.
We apologies for the inconvenience caused. “

Is this true anyone? Does WordPress have a 404 load from a “style sheet”!?

So I’m at a loss – It’s great that Dale has said he’s looking into it but they seem to have closed the door on me! Tough luck, we don’t support WordPress and our servers don’t work with it but sorry for any inconvenience!

I guess at the moment, without the fix their service IS NOT compatible with WordPress. What’s frustrating is that it took them 4 weeks to admit that and I have lost a lot of time money and credibility with my client, attempting to get to the bottom of it!

I desperately look forward to FH finding a fix and thank you for your support Darren…

I’ve posted a detailed run-down of what Dale and I have discovered so far here. Hopefully we’ll get there one way or the other…

They are working on it albeit, as I mentioned, slowly, in our recorded telephone conversation here.

They do say they will sort it because they do not want an issue with WordPress and the reputation they’ll gain if they don’t sort it out.

To late…

Ok, this is really frustrating. No solution yet from fasthosts?

Nice:

Unfortunately, the internal investigation has confirmed we are unable to resolve this issue.
Our servers are set up to read custom error pages (using the Fasthosts Service) from the root directory.
Wordpress have coded the 404 response page to load from a style sheet in a sub directory. Although the server setup does play a part in the issue, it is not something we are able to resolve, as we offer Error pages as part of our hosting platform.
I would suggest contacting WordPress regarding the error :
Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_header()
and see if they can suggest a workaround.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

Interesting… exactly the same copy & paste brush-off response that I received as well.

I’ve written to the sales department to point out that their support dept are effectively telling existing customers to **** off and solve their own problems and that this is more likely to result in an exodus of WP users to new hosting providers, but so far, no response.

I guess they’ve run a cost-benefit analysis and decided that losing a few (dozen? hundred? thousand?) customers will cost them less than actually solving the problem.

Disappointing.

Hi,

Has anyone figured out a work arround for this issue yet? It seems that on my wordpress install it is worse than I first thought. I first noticed a problem when I went to set up custom error pages for my entire site, not just wordpress. I used the fasthosts control pannel to do this, but then all the permalinks to my blogs were broken. I eventualy found a work around by setting the custom 404 page to be managed by the .htaccess file rather than fasthosts control pannel.

Then a week or so later I have been getting annoyed with lots of long posts on the front page of our site lately and have set the max number to 3 posts, when I did this I realised that the older posts button doesn’t work at all. With our without the custom 404 page created by the .htaccess or using the fasthost method. I beleave that this is the same issue causing all of these problems however I’m far to limmited in my coding skills to work out how wordpress is using the permalinks, and I really don’t want to move host as I have just ironed out all the bugs in our instalation of PHP list (incidentaly the problems with this were also caused by the way fasthosts have set up their servers).

you can take a look at the problem yourselves at Media Renegades

Hi,

I have solved some of our issues. I discovered that the problem with the older posts button was related to Permalink Redirect. I didn’t realise this plugin was still installed and removing it fixed the problem.

I know someone that has a pretty extensive coding knowlage that will look into the fasthosts 404 problem. I told them to post here if they find the answer. Fingers crossed.

Fingers most definitely crossed, aye! ??

I am also having the same problems and again, my site is hosted with FastHosts – any more developments surfaced? This used to work fine, and only lately have I noticed the issue.

All that appears on my error page is part of the footer cut off: https://alpha-lite.co.uk/nothinghere/ … =/