Comments on: 404 Issues (Fasthosts/WordPress Bug)

By: Lewis

Lewis — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:22:54 +0000

Whoever figured this out is amazing. Ive been trying for ages to crack this. I must admit I didn’t think it was going to do work. I’m well pleased. Thanks so much.

By: Joff

Joff — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 02:17:53 +0000

This has to be one of the craziest bugs I’ve seen and also one of the most frustrating to debug so thanks to the OP for coming up with a solution.

For anyone wanting a quick string generator, I used http://textmechanic.com/Random-String-Generator.html but only generated 7875 characters, adding the HTML comment delimiters around it: .

Incidentally, Darren’s fix is neater and possibly the more correct of the two methods to use

By: Darren Clark

Darren Clark — Wed, 26 May 2010 07:55:27 +0000

Note, the php content was stripped from the post, for the full reply visit:
http://cwebd.co.uk/replies/404-issues-fasthostswordpress-bug.txt

By: Darren Clark

Darren Clark — Wed, 26 May 2010 07:52:18 +0000

After completing a wordpress upgrade for a client I also came across this issue where the 404′s were showing a blank page with the header:

“500 Server closed connection without sending any data back”

After some testing I found that fasthosts will not allow the 404 header to be set as per:

I therefore tested if other headers could be set and the next acceptable header for a 404 is a 410 Gone, which Google and other search engines will use as per:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033

To use this modify your theme 404.php and add at the top of the file:

Your error pages should be working properly and for SEO purposes only valid content is indexed correctly.

By: Mikie

Mikie — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:30:22 +0000

Thanks for that update Tony – always helpful for the next poor soul trying to fix it!

By: tony cook

tony cook — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:05:16 +0000

Thanks for getting back. My first client is on a linux server and pretty permalinks works perfectly fine (ie http://www.logoed.co.uk/sample-post/) but my other client has a MS server and it just 404′s on me, except for the homepage. It is a documented problem with fasthosts if you google it.

You can get around it by setting the permalink links to: /index.php/%category%/%postname%/ which is not ideal as you end up with http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php/pagename instead of just http://www.domain.co.uk/pagename.

Thanks anyway.

By: Mikie

Mikie — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:46:04 +0000

Hey Tony, I set the permalinks to use the http://www.logoed.co.uk/2010/04/23/sample-post/ setup option, which is one of their standard options that is a lot nicer than the ?p=123 default. This has always worked perfectly – and to be honest haven’t tried to be able to get it working using the category setting. But I can’t see why it would be an issue, unless it can’t be done normally (I assume it can though).

I think Fasthosts do mention that they recommend Linux rather than Windows to ensure that everything works properly (this site is on Linux).

So no help from me I’m afriad!

By: tony cook

tony cook — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:11:00 +0000

As you seem to be running wordpress with fasthosts have you come across pretty permalinks not working? I’m trying to get /%category%/%postname%/ to work as a custom permalinks but this just results in a fasthost 404 page – and not my custom 404 page (I have added the extra character like you suggest). After googling it it seems to have something to do with MS Internet Information Services (IIS), but the fixes I have found are far beyond my skills to do – I’m really not a coder.

Two of my clients are with fasthosts and I’ve have nothing but problems. Luckily my first client has a linux server so I’m not getting the above error but we couldn’t get WP to email out without hacking the code in wp-includes\pluggable.php so it would work with fasthosts.

If you have come across this, any “idiots guide” help would be great.

By: Rob Andrews

Rob Andrews — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:51:47 +0000

Well done.

This one has been bothering me for a while. I did also spot that it seemed to be skipping a number of characters and tried to put some in to fix this. However, I think I put in which did not work, than I gave up.

Fasthost… you let your self down on this and a number of other issues (script time limit 30 seconds is my worst one).