Web Developer Resources by Brian Shim — WordPress, Divi, accessibility, hosting, troubleshooting
Tips and tricks for web hosts like Gridpane, Siteground, GoDaddy, and more!
Recently, after cloning this site to the same server but with a new subdomain, I had a problem where the WordPress admin had no styling. The strange part was that the front-end was perfectly fine! The error was that when an admin tried to load CSS using https://developer.brianshim.com/wp-admin/load-styles.php, the server was returning a 404 error. … Read more
I had a client site that was experiencing a bot attack, so naturally, I turned to Cloudflare to mitigate it. Fortunately, it was already on Cloudflare, so all I had to do was enable the Cloudflare proxy in the DNS so it could start intercepting traffic. But, as soon as I did this, I got … Read more
I use the discontinued Gridpane Pro plan for web hosting. It’s no longer offered to new users, but I’m grandfathered in. The features of the plan are no longer listed on the Gridpane website or their forum (as far as I could find), so I used the Wayback Machine to go back to 2020 to … Read more
I had a situation where I updated the PHP version in cPanel from 7.3 to 8.0, but on the actual server it was still at 7.3. No matter what I did in cPanel, the PHP version wouldn’t change on my actual server! I called up the host, GoDaddy, and they quickly found the problem. It … Read more
Wherever you host your websites, you should have automatic regular backups made at the server level (in addition to other methods). GoDaddy offers an automatic backup service called “Essential Website Backup” which backs up your site to a separate cloud server; you could even use it to back up a site not hosted on GoDaddy. … Read more
There may be some instances where you want to restart PHP on your GoDaddy shared server. For example, you might want to do this if your server is misbehaving, i.e., serving HTML files but not PHP. I had a case where the site was showing the error “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the … Read more
After years of being a satisfied customer of Siteground, I finally had to find a new host because my sites were outgrowing their GoGeek shared hosting plan. I guess that’s a good problem to have. Although I love and still recommend Siteground for their shared hosting, and I knew they offered VPS hosting, I wanted … Read more
I have a client who was having chronic server downtime on GoDaddy. A customer support rep pointed me to the Resource Usage page on cPanel which showed the CPU was maxed out. When I investigated the Apache logs, I discovered that several of the sites on the server were under DDoS (distributed denial of service) … Read more
If you look up how to increase your PHP max file size, most sources will tell you to change the upload_max_filesize setting in your php.ini file. Well, I did that and it still wasn’t working for me on my client’s shared GoDaddy Linux hosting. So, I called them up and found the un-publicized “secret” way to … Read more
Here’s how to host multiple sites on your EC2 instance running the Amazon Linux AMI. Remember to make a backup of your instance before proceeding. Assign a Static IP Address The first thing you should do, if you haven’t already, is assign a static IP address to your EC2 instance. You can do this in the Amazon … Read more