Windows Server 2008

Hi there, I'm having a bit of an issue and have spoken to your customer support to no avail. Tim (user: tima), I hope you can help.

Our goal: Install Wordpress using our Windows Hosting Premium account.

The intention is to install Wordpress with our windows hosting and have it point to the MySql database on our free Linux sub-domain.

Progress: We are a long time customer and from what I have read on your forums in this thread, older customers are on servers with Windows 2003 (this does not support PHP, which Wordpress requires). So, having attempted to install Wordpress on our Windows hosting account... I am prompted to download the install.php file when I call it up in the browser (this seems to affirm the fact that PHP support is NOT on the server that Myhosting.com has us on).

I continued to look on your forums for answers. I then came upon this thread where your product manager, Tim, says that your Windows 2008 servers support PHP. This is essentially the solution I was looking for, however, I want to be sure. So I did an on-line chat with someone named Chris and spoke to a customer rep on the phone, also named Chris (same person?), and both said your Windows servers do not support PHP.

Basically, I need a definite answer as to whether your Windows servers support PHP. If it is true that your latest servers do and your older servers don't, I need to know if we can be migrated over to a PHP supporting Windows server. I also need to know whether we can do this without having to cancel our account and create a new account (as per one of your customer's experiences in the linked threads).

Hope you can help.

Hello Ian,

I think I can help with a solution that should make it easier in all aspects. The reality is that presently our newer servers do support php within the Windows environment however it is not currently possible to use MySQL with it. Since Wordpress is based largely on MySQL, installing it directly to your Windows hosting space may be difficult if not impossible (perhaps there's an MS SQL solution?). We do intend to offer MySQL databases with our newer Windows accounts in the future but at this time it is not yet available.

That said, we offer installers for Wordpress that will easily install to your free linux subdomain which is included with all windows based plans. This would allow you to create something like blog.yourDomain.com and install wordpress to it.

Often the complaint with this is that some users would prefer to have their main domain (www.yourDomain.com) resolve directly to their blog rather than creating blog.yourDomain.com. There's a two step process in resolving this issue without the need for recreating your account once you've got your blog setup and configured on the subdomain.

The first step would be contacting our support team and requesting that your subsite be switched with your main site so that your blog will be seen at both your www.yourDomain.com site and on the subdomain. The reason it needs to be viewable on both is that until step two is complete, your Wordpress settings will attempt to force the site URL to be the original subdomain which will simply error out if the subdomain no longer resolves properly.

The second step is within your Wordpress General Settings page in the admin interface where you will see two settings fields:

WordPress address (URL): http://blog.yourDomain.com
Blog address (URL): http://blog.yourDomain.com

Basically, update those to remove the subdomain and they appear as below:

WordPress address (URL): http://yourDomain.com
Blog address (URL): http://yourDomain.com

Once that's done, you will find that your blog site functions as it should no matter where you navigate within it. Prior to this second step, everytime you clicked a link on your blog the page URL would switch back to http://blog.yourDomain.com.

Hi there Jeremy,

Firstly, thanks for the prompt reply, I appreciate it.

I should probably explain a bit further, the setup we're trying to achieve... it might make understanding our problem easier. I think you might have offered a solution that might be usable, but I'm not entirely sure.

Our goal is to have multiple Wordpress installations on a hosting account. In this case, we only have the one MySQL database, so we were going to have each installation use that one database.

To do this, I thought we'd be able to host the Wordpress files on our Windows hosting account with ourdomain.com (after a move to a server with Windows 2008) and use our Linux sub-site's database information in the installation (we'd simply change the table prefix in each configuration). If I understand what you're saying, we can't do this? That is, we cannot use our sub-site MySQL database with a Wordpress installation that resides on our main site's Windows server?

Our situation is...

Our main site is ourdomain.com. We have an ASP store for this domain (which, as you may know, requires a Windows server). We also currently have a Wordpress installation at blog.ourdomain.com (using our Linux sub-site).

We need to have a second Wordpress installation. And, we'd like to have our Wordpress installations in sub-directories, so that we can access each by visiting: ourdomain.com/blog1 and ourdomain.com/blog2.

Will what your suggesting make this possible? Or will what your saying only be workable with a single Wordpress installation?

If the above isn't possible, is it possible for us to have ourdomain.com with a Linux server as our main hosting package, and have a Windows server for our Free sub-site/subdomain (free.ourdomain.com)?

Thanks for your help!

That does change my recommendations for sure. It is correct that it is not possible to connect to your linux account MySQL db from anything but your linux account.

You can certainly install multiple instances of Wordpress to your linux account however. During the installation of the second Wordpress location, you would just have to specify a custom prefix in the database settings. I believe by default the prefix is wp_ so you could setup the second one using wp2_ or similar and this will allow you to have two table sets (or as many as you like really).

You would however be forced to use something like blog.yourDomain.com/blogSite1 and blog.yourDomain.com/blogSite2 based on your current configuration; particularly if you wish to leave your asp store within your main domain hosting space. Depending on how you've decided to use SSL (be it vanity SSL or an Instant SSL dedicated SSL certificate) would greatly determine aswell how you should go about setting this up. A vanity SSL setup would be easier to move around while Instant SSL is directly associated with the domain name you choose and would not apply to subdomains should you choose to change that later.

All in all, if installing those two blogs under the subdomain subfolders is not an option for you a recreation of your account may need to be considered. During the signup process there are options to set the windows or linux side as your primary which would make the setup easier in post.

Quote:

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All in all, if installing those two blogs under the subdomain subfolders is not an option for you a recreation of your account may need to be considered. During the signup process there are options to set the windows or linux side as your primary which would make the setup easier in post.

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If I'm understanding you correctly, if we sign up for a new account, we would be able to have a Linux server as our primary (tied to ourdomain.com) and have a free sub-site Windows server (tied to xyz.ourdomain.com)?

If the above is accurate, this might be the route we would have to take. We could have the Wordpress installations on ourdomain.com/blog1 and ourdomain.com/blog2 and have the store located at shop.ourdomain.com.

We are trying to avoid having the Wordpress installations with urls that would appear as: xyz.ourdomain.com/blog1 for SEO and messy URL reasons. I will have to look into what what SSL certificate we have, but I do think that it is coming up for renewal soon, so it may not cost us much if we were forced to acquire a new one for the sub-domain.

That is correct, during the signup you should see the option to select the linux as your Primary site which would allow you to achieve just that.

I wanted to update this post to indicate that all our Windows plans do support PHP and MySQL as of some time ago!

I've just been told that no matter how hard I try I probably never will get drupal to work @ domainname/family/site. I'm told I need a subdomain like family.domainname.com. But I'm on your cheapest plan & the old one at that. The only thing I could do is upgrade.

Will upgrading to premium get me switched to your new cloud platform or whatever you call it? Or do I have to ask for that? I see you have a special going on now...but I'm sure it's for new customers. But I'd still like to know I'm being switched to the new platform.

Also is it still windows @ DomainName-dot-com& linux @ x.domainname.com? I use wordpress for my biz site. I use smf for my help forum. I'm trying to use this drupal to replace 3 softwares...& just use it for the family site. They said I need a subdomain name...like x.domainname.com. Do you only get one subdomain name? What about database? If I could get this drupal to work I'd probably use it for both sites. So it would work @DomainName-dot-com& also x.domainname.com?

Also is there a temp IP I get to use to build the new site(s) & move everything before pointing my domain name to the new place? I may very well use drupal in both domains. So it's not like I can really export then import...it'd be a different software's database tables. It's a lot of copying/pasting but I've done it before.

Thanks for any help. :)

hey - I will have CS look into it!