SprayflyLanguages, Linux, Life

As many of you will know, I’m a big fan of WordPress and run two or three blogs entirely based on this platform. Therefore I was rather excited to hear that a new version will be released on the 10th of March that contains some major updates and enhancements. I’ve just read a the review on the optiniche.com blog and it sounds like some parts will be barely recognisable – such is the change!
Anyway, a couple of weeks and I’ll hopefully have it up and running on here – although readers of this blog probably won’t notice any difference.

I run a few WordPress blogs on this website which is hosted on a shared server by the UK hosting company, Heart Internet. I can genuinely say that this host provides excellent customer service and decent performance for the money I pay. In fact, I have never had any problems with them at all in the past.

More recently, whilst making a few postings on this blog and others (all running the latest version of WordPress), I discovered that whilst I was pasting links to postings on friends’ blogs into the body of my posts, no pingbacks were appearing on ANY of those blogs. I began to investigate and soon found out that not only were pingbacks not working to external sites (or my own blogs for that matter) but any outbound trackbacks were also unsuccessful. On the other hand, all incoming pingbacks and trackbacks were displaying fine – as they had been doing for a long time.

Convinced that this must be some problem with the setup of my WordPress installations, I disabled all running plugins, checked all relevant options on the Admin panel and tried posting pingbacks and trackbacks to various well-known trackback/pingback testing site (such as TestTrack)… however all this was still to no avail!

Finally, I decided to prove to myself that this was not me just being stupid and made a new clean install of WordPress on my server and tried using that to post trackbacks and pingbacks. As I had expected, even a brand new and shiny WordPress blog was unable to successfully send outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks. This left just one possibile source of the problem… my webhost!

So… I searched around to see if anybody else was experiencing the same problem – lo and behold there was another WordPress user in exactly the same situation. Here is the thread he created in the WordPress support forums.

I’ve just installed WordPress 2.0.4 and cant get pingback to work (trackback does)
My hosting company (shared server) are wondering if its because they block port 80…could this be a problem?

This sounds vaguely familiar to me!

Yes, it is. The trackback is an outbound connection on port 80. I would see if they could allow it for your account.

Um, 2.0.4? You do know that there are much newer versions, right?

Uh oh… sounds like trouble!

Ok – thanks – yeah I did know about version – but my hosting company www.heartinternet.co.uk has a one-click install version which happens to be 2.0.4!

Ooohh! How strange indeed – this other user is hosted by nobody other than Heart Internet. Could this just be a pure coincidence…? Anyhow, I figured a quick support ticket to Heart customer support should do the trick… just ask them to open up outbound connections on port 80 and we’re sorted… right?

Well… actually no! Here is the response I received:

Thanks for the reply. Sorry but I can’t do that, it’s a global change and so not something I can do for you. That’s disallowed to prevent recursive loops from occuring to the benefit of all customers on the same hardware.

Ouch! Whilst I do understand their point of view here, I would argue that its not just me who would benefit from this change. I’m sure that what with WordPress being the most popular blogging software out there and Heart Internet being such a big host, there are plenty of other dissatisfied Heart Internet customers who would also like to see their copy of WordPress working properly. To add to the shame, Heart even provide a one-click install option for WordPress, have a look at their description:

WordPress is arguably the most popular blogging software available today! It’s easy to install and use and will allow you to have a great looking blog in minutes. Please note that this feature will use one of your MySQL databases.

Ahem, so even the guys at Heart Internet admit how popular it is… yet they insist on keeping outbound connections on port 80 blocked… tut tut tut! Most other popular web hosts support outgoing port 80 connections, I really can’t see why they are being so stubborn?

So… it looks like for the moment I have hit a dead end and for the short term will be unable to make any outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks using the WordPress platform. Heart Internet support said that they would “gladly pass long [my] comments” to the guys in the suits but whether this will really have any outcome remains to be seen. My only other option is to move hosts, which I am reluctant to do. As I have already said, until I hit this problem, I was quite satisfied with my web host.

Anyhow, let this be a warning to anybody out there looking for a new web host. If you want to use WordPress on your site and would like to be able to make the most of Trackbacks and Pingbacks… I would suggest that you don’t visit http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/ but rather that you take a look elsewhere…