Here is a question for the hosts. Tried to do a favor for a member who went with a cut rate hosting company and a shared server that she came across. The site looked good on the outside and she simply wanted a couple items upgraded, no problem right? Let's see...
The first issue was a non-issue, access via FTP on Port 21 instead of Port 22
Then when that adjustment was made, it just kept hanging up on connecting, would not go past it, no matter how hard I pressed my mouse button to abort and reconnect, held my tongue, nothing was working.
Next up, I realized, I had my WinSCP set to do SFTP as I always do, I don't even think about it, I just do it.
Well, the server did not like connections via SFTP so I had to alter it to FTP and run unencrypted on this one. Big deal, I'm set to Binary Transfer, what can go wrong.
Well the server had a 5 minute time out on all FTP Connections and I was in it for a lot longer than 5 minutes, but what's the big deal on that? I've had FTP's lose server connection in the middle of a file edit, no big deal, just reconnect and all is good.
Well, what I did not know is what hurt really bad. WinSCP when set to FTP and not SFTP sets the files in a temporary directory when you lose connection and does not necessarily hold everything perfect that way.
Next issue, when doing binary uploads to a server in FTP mode and not SFTP mode it made a mess, complete and total mess, we are talking Katrina was more polite when her and all 5 of her sisters partied for a weekend than this server was. When re-uploading the files back to the server, it took it upon itself to remove all hard carriage returns from the files and dump a 472 line php file all onto one line.
So the question to the hosts, many of you I'm sure have never experienced anything like this in the past, how do you deal with a server like this? What can be done beyond the Binary uploads to get the files in correctly and securely to the server as they are written?
Yes, I even tried downloading them, editing and reuploading to the server and it was still a complete and total mess. Also, don't know if it matters, but the server on this one is in Europe and not the US
