Appearance on admin page–no functionality

Can this problem come back?

It’s a problem either with the server’s configuration at Bluehost, or with the amount of load on the server (as a shared hosting customer at Bluehost, you’re sharing the same server with thousands of other sites).

This change you made won’t affect the front of your site, only the admin interface. Basically, you may notice that the admin interface is slightly slower than it used to be, but you’ll also notice that it’s working properly now. ??

So, should I let Blue Host know or is that something Word Press will do?

I guess this means they must have shifted something on their servers between Wed when my site worked fine and Thursday when it stopped working.

I doubt mine will be the only site with this problem! Blue Host told me they host more Word Press sites than anyone else.

No, there’s nothing we can do about this besides confirm that disabling concatenation is the right way to go: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Editing_wp-config.php#Disable_Javascript_Concatenation

Bluehost *may* be able to do something about it, but considering that it worked once before, I suspect it simply may be the load on your server from all of the other accounts on it.

This is one of the trade-offs with shared hosting, you share resources with everyone else, and that’s why we built in a way around this particular load-impacted issue by providing a way to disable concatenation.

As soon as my business gets to a critical point, I will definitely get dedicated hosting. But for now, it doesn’t make sense to spend the money on dedicated hosting.

Interesting that none of the people at Blue Host support mentioned anything about this as an issue or offered me the right solution.

Can you recommend a better hosting company?

I wouldn’t blame them for it, not because they are one of our recommended hosts https://www.ads-software.com/hosting/ , but because it’s not an obvious problem offhand. I’m sure we all would have found the cause eventually.

In order for us to have noticed it, we would have needed the results from your browser’s JavaScript console, which is why I asked yesterday: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/appearance-on-admin-page-no-functionality?replies=36&view=all#post-8669213

Based on what your friend quoted, I assume that this is what your friend did.

To give a more “physical world” anecdote, these kind of things remind me of why my truck’s engine needed to be rebuilt. I was accelerating to freeway speeds, and suddenly it started violently shake. We went through 2 mechanics at the dealer before the 3rd decided to disassemble the entire engine and found that a spring roughly the size of a mechanical pencil’s spring had broken, causing a valve to fail.

I didn’t blame the other 2 mechanics for missing it, the truck had to make its way to someone who had the tenacity to disassemble the entire engine and inspect every single part until winding up with a broken spring that was about an inch long and 2 millimeters wide.

All web software is kind of like that engine. Millions of problems can be caused millions of ways, and finding the problem is often just the luck of running the right test or looking directly at the right competent.

That’s interesting. My friend found the problem and fixed it in less than 10 minutes.

He is an expert and I’m sure that’s why he knew exactly what to look for.

Yep, that’s probably it. ??

I’m glad it’s resolved and hope it will stay that way.

It does seem like Blue Host should be alerted that their shared servers may have this problem!

I’m sure they’re aware of it, it’s a common-yet-infrequent problem. Something that’s not always looked for, but when found it’s “Oh yeah, that thing again.”

Interesting. None of their many tech support people I spoke with suggested it, so seems like they need to be reminded.

Also makes me wonder if they need to set some limit to the amount of sharing per server. I guess there was adequate space on the server until Thursday and then it got tipped over the limit of sites it could support and my site admin started malfunctioning.

I’m sure they could do more to limit customers on each server, but that would undoubtedly raise everyone’s monthly rate too.

Right, but raising the rate a little is better than having a non-functional website! I lost two days of work because of this issue and was ready to just ask for my money back and give up on them completely.