Fatal consequences using W3 Total Cache combined with HostGator!

:/ That’s not a quote from HostGator.

MrsBit,

Who are you to question my intentions, and why?

The above quote is indeed from HostGator Support and my site is indeed still taken offline.

If you, MrsBit, has any questions regarding my claims, you are more than welcome to contact me directly to get a very straight answer to your false accusations!

My presence in this forum is in no way anonymous. I’m am in fact very easy to find, should anyone wish to.

You, on the other hand, cover your self behind a fake name, and a generic avatar!

Michael Johansen
Managing Director
PixieHouse, Inc.

aka pixiehouse, aka johanzen

Thank you @johanzen. I have had the exact same experience with Host Gator and the W-3 Cache. Thought it appears you’ve had better service from HG, with their providing some indication of exactly what the problem appears to be. Thanks for sharing this information.

Hi,

You have not mentioned if you are on shared hosting, VPS or Dedicated???

The fact is that if you are on Shared Hosting then Database and Object Cache are not supported and are not advised to use due to the high I/O throttling that those to functions cause on shared hosting accounts!

Read this on the Hostgator Forums https://forums.hostgator.com/wordpress-w3-settings-t146131.html

You will also see that one of the HostGator Employees has been kind enough to post a verified Working W3-Total-Cache-config.php
Which I myself have recently used and it works very well without modification.

If you are on a CDN such as myself just add your info where applicable in W3TC settings as usual.

Hi Campbell,

Thank you for a kind and very useful answer!

I am / was on a shared server. I’m moving out of Hostgater as I’ve had it with them.

My site(s) are on and off all the time. Some times only for a few minutes, sometimes for much more, during the day – every day! No explanation – No real help to find out why. It’s been going on for almost a year by now, and I’ve spend countless of hours with their support.

And now this! I have had my site suspended for now almost 26 hours, even though I immediately disabled W3-Total-Cache and wrote to support.

No response so far, so I’m off for an other more trustworthy host!
I’m trying to run a business, not to take a degree in programming!

2 thing come to my mind:

1) It should be clearly mentioned in the W3-Total-Cache setup instructions, that Database and Object Cache are not supported and are not advised to use when on a share hosting!

2) Even though HostGator is a cheap hosting solution, it is outrageous bad support to leave a customer with his site being offline this long. My last email to support was sent 11? hours ago. No answer yet!

After 26 hours!

Hello Michael-

W3 Total Cache is a good plugin, but it does have two options that if they are enabled generates this issue. This is why in our guide we specify not to use those options:
https://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/w3-total-cache-wordpress-plugin

It is due to this confusion that we are reccomending WP Super Cache, as the options list is less extensive. At this time I have set up WP Super Cache on your primary domain and have removed the restriction on your account. If you have any other wordpress installations, it would benefit not only the server load, but your site speed to use it on them, following this guideline: https://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/wp-super-cache-plugin

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter, and at this time the block against your site has been removed.
Cordially,

Zach E.
Server Monitoring
HostGator.com LLC
https://support.hostgator.com

Case (study) Closed!

Your welcome johanzen

Truth be told, I never found that WP-Super Cache worked that well on Host Gator Shared I have had more luck with W3TC myself. However, there are many settings that can get users into trouble when using W3TC if not used properly. Here is what I find to be the best source and info on setting up w3tc it is from 2010 but regardless of that it still seems to be the most well put together guide https://zemalf.com/1443/w3-total-cache/

The problem is that places like tentblogger for example tend to go into detail that only apply to VPS settings but they fail to mention that part when reading the tutorial.