It appears that WordPress custom themes and Fasthosts servers don’t get on when it comes to 404 error pages.
I’ve installed a couple of wordpress blogs on my fasthosts hosting account and none of them displays the custom 404 error page properly. When you try to view a page that doesn’t exist you get at best a completely blank page and at worst a page of code.
At the time, being new to the wordpress system, I assumed that I’d done something wrong – until that is I installed the exact same set up with a different hosting provider and lo and behold I’ve got the 404 page I was expecting. Imagine my surprise!
So, having scoured the Internet for the answer I found it was a problem with Fasthosts not my installation skills. So I turned to Fasthosts’ own support who couldn’t give me a satisfactory reason so I still don’t really understand why this happens. Their last email said:
The custom error page services that we provide should work fine when redirecting to a static page. What will not work is if you try to capture the error code on that page as it’s redirected hence no error code exists.
Wordpress works fine on our shared server but I am aware that some additional modules may require a dedicated server. If this is the case I recommend using a dedicated server if your contents require more than is possible on a shared hosting system.
Hope this helps.
No it doesn’t help. Clearly wordpress doesn’t work fine on your servers Fasthosts because a quick scan of Google turns up a significant number of other people all experiencing the same problems as i have.
But 6 months on and I’ve found a fix!!! Well I say I have but really its thanks to ‘Nyleveia’ on the wordpress forums and it works like a dream!
Found a bit of a quick fix for fasthost users.
Firstly, if you can, create a page within wordpress for your 404 information (or setup some other form of 404 page), then go to the 404.php code and replace the entire code with the following :<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.domain.com/404.php‘ ) ;
?>Save, and then your error pages wont be messed up anymore.
Not perfect, but better than nothing!
So hopefully this will save you hours of your precious time – needless to say I’m in the process of moving all my hosting away from Fasthosts. Perhaps they’re hoping that wordpress won’t catch on!!!
P.S. This works great with WooThemes and other custom themes but sadly I’ve got no idea how to fix the Thesis theme (my php skills are not up to it) which is why the 404 on this site still doesn’t work – any help very gratefully received :)
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
The downside is that you won’t get a 404 HTTP status code being returned with this method, which is kind of the point with 404 pages (it tells search engines that the page does not exist).
Setting the status code using a PHP header() command doesn’t seem to do the job on Fasthost-hosted sites either… have spent a long evening trudging through this and the only conclusion is to change hosting provider…