Web Development

The shopping cart I have been developed hit a major slow a couple weeks ago and I couldn’t find a solution, which is very rare. Well, a couple days ago I looked for a PHP forum. This was after I had given up on 1&1 support after many calls and many emails, Paypal thought it was on my hosting end and wasn’t getting many responses and other companies told me to switch hosting providers.

Well, I explained my situation and in about a 24 hour period they figured it was my cURL version was old because it was an old PHP version (4.4.7) on the dedicated SSL. I had tried to get 1&1 to upgrade this before using .htaccess, but your .htaccess files don’t affect your SSL server. I now knew that I had to get it upgraded for it to work.

I was thinking about this for a while. In the mean time I sent a support request to Paypal seeing if there was any alternate solution to using the old cURL version (they didn’t really know what I was talking about) and sent a request to 1&1, thinking I would just badger them a bit more, hoping someone could change it.

Before I go on, I thought I should comment quickly on 1&1. After asking them how to upgrade to the higher PHP version, I explained the reason being I needed to upgrade the cURL version.

They responded and told me I needed to upgrade my PHP version. I responded saying that I had asked that question, and I needed to know how.

Next response tells me that sorry, but you can’t upgrade your PHP version. Great, well I already had another solution worked out, I just didn’t like it.

PHP 5 has its own extension “.php5″. I tried this on the server and it did support it, meaning 1&1 had lied again. This handled my problem and I was able to connect successfully to Paypal! Yes! Now I just have to finish implementing WPP (Website Payments Pro).

-Kerry

P.S. I also have another script that I will be blogging about soon. It generates Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds, but its not in a finalized form though it does work correctly.

It’s not something to count on, that’s for sure.

As most of you know I’ve been trying to install a shopping cart using Paypal’s Website Pro setup. Well, I basically finished developing it up to the point where I am submitting the credit card information to Paypal. I then ran into a barrier. Apparently 1&1 blocks post requests from a secure server, you have to use a proxy. Other people talk about it on Paypal which is how I found out about it.

So, I send them a support request asking for their help. They sent me a reply on how to set up my SSL certificate… apparently that didn’t get my question.

I called them up, and explained my problem. After I fully explained it, the girl said “let me pass you over to tech support”. I said “ok” but was slightly confused as I had dialed the tech support number, but it seemingly doesn’t go to them. Then a woman with a thick accent picks up the phone and I have to fully reexplain my problem, and because we can’t understand each other that well, it takes more time. She ends up saying that she will have to ask her supervisor.

So she puts me on hold for several minutes, comes back and tells me something that completely didn’t answer my question. I explain it again. She says she will have to go to her supervisor again, and puts me on hold for several more minutes. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of pressing the key to hang up instead of unmute myself at this point, and I knew they didn’t really keep logs of this and there was no way I could call back that same person, so I gave it up. I had spent 20 minutes on the phone and gotten absolutely NO WHERE.

This is just one of many problems I’ve had with their support. They also specifically told me that they do not support letting your web page have some pages that are secured by SSL and others aren’t. They gave me a reference to turn my whole site into SSL, or none of it. At the time, for whatever odd reason, maybe the SSL hadn’t been completely setup, it wouldn’t let me go to a specific page as https://, I had to turn my whole site into a secured site. Well, I didn’t believe them . After I got off the support call, I decided to try again.

They had rewritten my .htaccess file. They never told me they were going to override it, I had a lot of code in it besides the part about the SSL. They erased valuable code, and it took me a while to hunt it back down again and getting the site running as it was supposed to run. I then proceeded to go to my website, having it be optional SSL or not secure (what I wanted), and it worked. They had lied, whether they knew it or not.

1&1 has great price and good hosting features and everything like that. Do not expect good support.

-Kerry