27 May 2012, 19:26

Reading the forums, I have noticed that a lot of the post problems either go back to the hosting company or are made worse by the hosting companies.

When trying to solve issues that remain persistent consider what I am about to say.

When people sign up to a hosting company their application implies unless it is made absolutely clear in the contract that thier site will be hosted under their domain name. This means that in the top left box in say Linux should be www.yourdomainname.com and not any thing else such as c123456-zen.co.uk

If you do see something like c123456_zen.co.uk in that place then you are on a shared hosting system which will cause you untold problems when trying to get mahara to work.

Under the above scam system the hosting company is effectively stealing your contents ranking because everyone typing in your address are being invisibly or visibly redirected to the c123456-zen.co.uk

Another issue again with zen hosting is that under certian packages, you pay to be able to either have ADDITIONAL web site addresses targeting your hosting domain e.g. c123456-zen.co.uk the scam address or you you can have what is called PARKED domain names. Now if you have www.yourdomainname.com 

 in the cpanel address box this is no problem as you can put non mahara files in the Addon or Parked domain names folders, in most cases non mahara files will run perfectly happily in this system, though you run into the SEO and ranking problems outlined above. When say a googlebot goes to your website and is redirected to your hosting sites cpanel which has say the c123456_zen_co..uk tag whose sites content is it recording ‘Yours’ or ‘Zen’s?

Now, using thE system with mahara located in either an ADDON domain name folder or a PARKED domain name folder causes loads of problems. This is because the domain names located in these folders effectively have a redirect to the c123456-zen.co.uk folder. Each time a person clicks on a link he is bounced between these folders and as a result of this is logged out and has to log back in again.

I suspect that this is a major cause of a lot of other problems with mahara as well.

So if you are having this problem with your hosting company what can you do about it?

The first thing you can do is to find a new hosting company and make your requirements absolutely clear and tap record or use email to discuss the contract.

If your tied into a 12 month or 18 month contract which seems to be very popular with scumbag firs these days you can withhold payment until the problem is solved. Again make sure you record everything as evidence.

At law, you assertion is that the hosting companies facilities was originally and still are unfit for purpose and that hosting company had missled you as to their service provision e.g. that you would be able to upload and run your web site on their server.

If you made your requirements absolutely clear in writing prior to signing up to the hosting company you also have a good case for compensation for lost time and business because presales agreements even verbal ones are implied contractual terms or the final contract.

Remember, you agreed to their terms and conditions at the time of signing up to the agreement, you did not agree to any changes unless they were sent to you prior to them coming into force. A change in a contractual term nullifies the previous contract and forms a new one, which you can either accept or reject.

The main thing is to tell the hosting company that you wish to run mahara on their servers and ask if they are set up to run the programme. I it ends up that you cannot run mahara on their server then you can get out of the contract using the arguments above.

Oh yes, the same problem can persist if you have your domain name with one company pointing to another hosting company’s servers. The Cpanel on your hosting company must be the same name as your domain name.