Heart Internet Web Hosting: Wordpress Trackbacks and Pingbacks not supported
February 21st, 2008
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…
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Hi,
Like your blog! I am looking for a good uk wordpress host and heart internet seems to have good value! But I’m a bt skeptical now since you mentioned this problem. Sorry for my ignorance (I’m a noob!) but what use is an external pingback? Is it important?
Cheers!
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:42 am
Hi there.
In a Wordpress post, when you add links to external blogs, Wordpress will automatically ‘ping’ those sites when you publish the post. This means those sites will be informed that you have referred to them in your post and will display a link back to your post in their comments section. For more info on pingbacks see this page.
Its what makes Blogs such a community experience - people write about other people’s posts and there is a whole network of interlinking. I personally think it’s a fairly important feature!
Jono
February 24th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
OK thanks!
BTW, just out of curosity are you French? If so, then why do you use a UK based host? I heard things in europe are usually cheaper than the UK!
Cheers!
February 26th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Hi there Brian
No, I’m not French although I do speak French and have been known to be a bit of a francophile!!
I normally live in the UK but am currently away in China for the year studying. Yeah, things are indeed cheaper on the continent than in the UK, pity I don’t live in France or elsewhere…
Erm… is the UK not in Europe?!
Hehe, best of luck finding a host.
Jono
April 6th, 2008 at 8:38 am
[...] far too much for my web hosting package with Heart Internet UK, especially considering that they lacked support for some really important features such as Trackbacks and Pingbacks in Wordpress and did not support Subversion (useful for testing [...]
June 9th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Been trying to figure this out for ages, went through same as you trying to enable pingbacks.
Will post on my blog and leave a trackback, o i cant!!!
Truly ridiculous and will be leaving them asap.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Hi Paul
If you are moving to another host, I would strongly recommend Mediatemple’s Grid (gs) hosting package. Great value for money and has everything Heart has… and more! Most importantly, you will be able to send and receive trackbacks. I migrated a couple of months ago and have been really pleased with the service - do bear in mind that hosting is in the US though.
I have a feeling that Heart Internet are going to lose quite a few users because of this - especially as Wordpress, and blogging platforms in general, become increasingly popular.
Jono
June 10th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Its ridiculous that they dont support, cant be much of a problem if everyone else is happy with it.
I am wanting a UK host just to make sure for SEO, looking now, any UK host you can recommend. Been looking at http://www.eukhost.com/ seem to have similat features.
June 10th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Hi Paul
Eukhost looks pretty flexible with a much wider range of offerings than Heart Internet - I think they probably know more about what they are doing too!
I’m afraid I don’t know of any other UK hosts as I now have my site hosted with MediaTemple.
Good luck anyway, send me a trackback/pingback when you have migrated
June 15th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Heart Internet don’t block port 80 outgoing connections. If they did, then even a simple wget from SSH would fail. There must be another reason why Wordpress pingback does not work. Does it try to ping itself? If it does, this will be blocked as Heart block loopback connections.
June 15th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Simo
Of course Heart won’t blanket block all outgoing port 80 connections on their servers. What they do instead is block all outgoing connections on port 80 made via the Apache process - hence blocking any php scripts from having access to the web. Normal server processes such as wget, lynx, rsync and many others are still able to make outgoing connections on port 80, in fact this is pretty vital to allow the server to be maintained.
Heart claim that they maintain this policy to protect their users （as they run shared servers). However, many other shared hosts allow outgoing connections on port 80 as standard.
Here’s some evidence that they have this policy - in the form of a support ticket sent to Heart:
Hi Robert
I found the following post which seems to pin the problem down immediately - since it relates to another Heart Internet user with the same problem!
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/133584
Please can you enable outgoing connections on port 80 for my account?
Thanks for your help.
Jonathan Lumb
On 2008-02-21 08:43:43, Robert Berry changed the ticket status to CLOSE-PENDING and wrote:
Hi Jonathan,
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.
Best Wishes
Robert Berry
Heart Internet Support
Need I say anymore?
December 6th, 2008 at 6:36 am
In a Wordpress post, when you add links to external blogs, Wordpress will automatically ‘ping’ those sites when you publish the post
http://www.rakeshamudala.blogspot.com