Trouble installing wordpress on web.com hosting

  • Hello. I am attempting to install word press on the web.com hosting servers. I don’t really want to pay more money to upgrade their service and receive one click install options because apparently it can be installed manually. I’ve spent the past few hours scouring the internet for advice. There are wordpress forum posts where people have the same issues and i’ve tried to make sure that I followed all the available steps.

    I usually use dreamweaver and that was working originally so the server itself is up and running. I am using dreamweavers FTP service to upload wordpress? I just started a new site in dreamweaver and uploaded the files. I can download a free FTP program if needed but I assumed dreamweavers would work.

    One thing I did do was extract and edit the wordpress files on my computer before uploading them to the server. Was that a mistake? The reason I did that was because I was afraid the basic service web.com offers would not allow me to extract the zip files once they were on the server.

    1)Went on my web.com control panel and added a mySQL database with full privileges.
    2)I downloaded wordpress and extracted the files.
    3)Went into wp-config.php file and changed the following files with my server information.
    define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database_name_here’);
    /** MySQL database username */
    define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username_here’);
    /** MySQL database password */
    define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password_here’);

    4) I uploaded all of the wordpress files to the root directory on the server which is /html.

    When I try out https://domain.com/wp-admin/install.php I just get a blank page with nothing on it.

    What do you think i’m doing wrong? Can I not use Dreamweaver FTP to upload the files, or did I need to upload the zip file and extract it?

    Thanks a lot for any advice. I can contact web.coms customer service but I figured I would ask here as it seems the members of this forum know a lot. And I think the web.com service will just try and convince me to spend more money and take the easy route with an upgrade. This was the email I received from them, sounds like it will cost money to make this process easier which would be nice to avoid.

    “You can install wordpress onto your account, you can look up the 5 minute installation instructions from www.remarpro.com’s website. However, if you’re not going to be using the website builder anymore, I would suggest upgrading to our new hosting platform, it will provide much more tools for a custom built site, and also offers a one click installation option for wordpress. If you’d like to set up a test account, you can contact our Do-It-Yourself Billing Team between 9am – 9pm Atlantic Standard Time – Monday to Friday:”

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • justaquark,

    A blank install.php usually means something went wrong with the transfer of files to the web server; alternately, it could mean that your web server doesn’t have one or more of the prerequisites to run WordPress, such as PHP or MySQL, but I took a peek at web.com’s website and it seems that’s not the case.

    You’re right – manual install is possible, in the right conditions, on a web hosting service that doesn’t offer their own automatic install feature (or in your case, doesn’t offer their own automatic install feature on their cheaper tiers). You’re on the right track, but try wiping everything from your host and reupload a fresh unzip of the latest WordPress install package – and this time, DON’T edit wp-config.php. As long as your files have the correct permissions, the install.php step will edit your wp-config.php for you.

    Let me know if that doesn’t work, and we’ll try something else!

    Thread Starter justaquark

    (@justaquark)

    Terrykimura Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond I appreciate it.

    So I wiped everything from the host except the folders(there were no files inside these folders) wp-content > plugins > akismet. I couldn’t delete them for some reason just got an error message on dreamweavers FTP. So I renamed them random names just so they wouldn’t cause issues and get mixed with the reuploaded word press files.

    So this time I unzipped the “wordpress-4.3.1-en_CA” into the HTML folder on my hard drive. Then I uploaded that to the web.com server. Now on the server there is a folder for “cgi-bin”, “data”, “logs” and the “HTML” folder with the wordpress files. There is also the gibberish empty folders that I couldn’t delete and just renamed randomly.

    And as I said earlier I did add a SQL database.

    I am still getting a white page with no message when I visit https://domain.com/wp-admin/install.php.

    And now when I visit just the https://domain.com I get a “Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server.”

    I’ve been using the alternate domain for the hosting server because I didn’t want people stumbling across the unfinished website using the main domain. When I was exploring the web.com website a few minutes ago it said my main domain needs to be renewed? “Your domain is expired. To reactivate your domain name, website, email, and other domain services, renew now!”

    I paid the yearly fee for the hosting services a couple months ago. Maybe I needed to contact them to activate the domain again. I don’t really know. I called them to follow up on that but their billings/renewals dept. is closed until tomorrow morning. I’ll call again tomorrow and get to the bottom of that and see if I can get any more information on installing wordpress as well.

    I mention this on the off chance it would affect what I am trying to do. Not sure why it would as iv’e been successfully uploading my dreamweaver website to the alt domain the past couple weeks.

    Thanks again for your help!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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