This weeks blog is more educational. Aimed at all business owners or their web design and development providers who are searching online for an answer to just one of their web hosting nightmares.
During our time providing web design and development and web hosting solutions to businesses – we have seen many things. Especially when websites start to outgrow their current web hosting solution.
The more information, plugins, widgets etc that is added to your website – the more web hosting server resources are used.
When you reach your hosting limits – you will begin to see errors appear either on your website itself saying that the site can’t grow any further until limits are increased or certain things that you use regularly will just stop functioning.
An example of this is when you have added many menu items to the website and you receive a message that the systems MAX VARS needs to be increased for you to continue.
For the purposes of this blog – you don’t need to know exactly what MAX VARS is, but just like many other hosting server resources – if you exceed the set limit – you will be restricted until it has been increased by your provider, which is more commonly found on a shared hosting platform.
How-ever – some providers do allow you to override the set limit yourself using a special file (php.ini) that you create and upload to your hosting folders.
We show you below how to increase the MAX VAR limit using the file mentioned above, which were sure will help many people out there who require this fix/resolution urgently to make all work correctly as before.
This same procedure can also be used in to increase other set hosting limits like – MAX_POST_SIZE, MAX_UPLOAD_SIZE and many more by adding their relative code.
How to increase the VAR limit on a shared hosting solution:
Step 1:
The first thing you need to do is create a new text (.txt) file on your computer desktop. This can be done by right clicking anywhere on the desktop, hovering over new on the menu that appears and then clicking text document.
Step 2:
You then open the text file and add the following line of code to it:
MAX_VARS=3000
Step 3:
Once you have completed step 2. Save and close the file.
We now need to right click the file again and rename it to php.ini. Windows will ask you are you sure and you can click o.k. / yes depending on what options you are given.
Step 4:
You then need to log into your web hosting cpanel and upload the file to the Public_HTML directory folder that your website files are in.
Please Note: You must create the php.ini file on your computer first. Edit it and then upload to your hosting server – otherwise we have seen the file not work at all if created directly in the cPanel file manager.
If a php.ini file is already in place and working correctly – then you can simply edit that one without problem..
Step 5:
You now need to check the website to see if the error message is gone and the problem has been resolved.
Additional Step:
In 90% of cases – the above fix resolves the issue without problem. How-ever – we found that different providers setup their web hosting solutions differently and even though you have followed the above steps correctly – it may not resolve your problem. If this is the case for you – then there is one final step you can try before contacting your hosting provider for further support.
You must search you web hosting files for a file called .htaccess, which is usually found in the Public_HTML directory folder we placed our php.ini file in earlier.
If you don’t have one of these files in place already – then you can create on using the same process as you did in step 1 – i.e. right click on desktop, create file, open it, add code, save and rename to .htaccess.
The line of code to add to the .htaccess file is: suPHP_ConfigPath /home/USERNAME/public_html
Upload the file to your web hosting folder mentioned above and try the website again to see if all is now resolved.