I've been with my host since Noah first looked up and thought it looked like rain. It's fair to say that I'm more than happy with them. The service rarely has any downtime and the support is excellent. But... due to no fault of my host, I have been battling like mad to get sections of this website working as it should. It worked like a charm on my localhost, did everything I wanted it to. Then I uploaded it to my hosting service and all the wheels fell off.

I now know it should have been obvious what the problem was, but at the time I battered the keyboard and screamed at the monitor and spent most of the day in the place between self loathing, as I obviously missed something in the code and technophobia, as we all know technology really should have stopped moving forward once we arrived at the digital watch and pocket calculator era.

Strangely, sometimes the most obvious and direct trouble shooting route is not the route we take. Glaringly obvious as it seems now, three major bits of the site now weren't working and I just couldn't get my head around it.

• In the portfolio section when there is a single image and not a gallery, the thumbnail would not expand when clicked. Though the articles with the gallery images were working fine. (A seriously good clue)

• The Forums were no longer working. (Not surprising as I also had this linked into the sites ACL's.)

• I am currently running an ACL (Access Control Level) component to restrict certain areas, articles and forums of the site to clients. This had also gone haywire. (Not as good a clue as above as ACL's in Joomla! Can be a headache, I can't wait till Joomla! 1.6 gets released with inbuilt ACL's)

I thought it must have been something to do with an incorrectly entered path, or perhaps it was a SEF component that had gone bad. Nope... none of those, it was that I was being hosted on a server that was running PHP4.4.4 and the items that dropped out needed at least release 5. Maan! Was I hopping mad, mainly at myself for being such a time waster. Anyway to cut the rest of the story short my hosting service has moved me to an updated server running the software I require and the DNS's have just clicked into place, so I'm a happy chappie.

Lesson 1 of the day: Don't waste time diving in to fix a problem until the problem is properly understood.

Lesson 2 of the day: Don't presume that your hosting service understands your needs and automatically updates it's software.

Lesson 3 of the day: Google is your friend, use it to enter the error statements that pop up and you'll quickly narrow down the problem.

One more thing. I wasn't sure how to go about finding out which release of PHP my hosting server was running and I found this excellent bit of code that you enter into a .php document, upload it to your server and run it through your browser. A huge amount of information is pulled up into your browser window.

Instructions:

• Open your text editor (Notepad) and type or copy and paste the following line of code into the document:
• <?php phpinfo() ?>
• Save the text file in a way that you'll remember such as “hostinfo.php” or suchlike, it doesn't really matter.
• Make sure that the file extension is definitely .php and not .txt
• Upload the file to your hosting server.
• Open your browser and type in the address of the file eg. www.yoursite.com/hostinfo.php
• If you have php on your hosting server, the information will be displayed in your browser. The php version is generally displayed in the header of the document.