Damn you to hell mr server

Over the last 3-4 days I have been having some issues with the server, to say its been frustrating would be an understatement. For some reason in our cpanel's version of phpMyAdmin it looks like it works but it just doesn't at times. When using the GUI to do some things it looks like its doing it but hangs, this wasn't so bad when it was 1 thing but now there are multiple things that are all displaying similar tendencies.

To circumnavigate this, I was just going right into the SQL editor part of it and doing all my work in there, this for a short while was a perfect answer to it all. I then went onto the support forum for our hosting company and asked about the issues I was having. I was told that it has been this way for a couple of months and they have been in contact with cpanel to see if they can sort the issues, but are waiting for a reply.

All very positive and nothing too bad until Thursday night when it looked like the server was down. I contacted my friend who I share the hosting with but he wasnt having any issues. I ran a few checks and even tried to ping the server all to no avail. I then checked my internet connection to be told by their diagnostics that there was an issue and they would look into it. Phew I thought, hopefully it will be sorted by the morning. Morning came, I checked before work.... no still the same issue even after multiple re-starts.

So I left it all and went to work, where I discovered that I could get onto the server no problem. So during my lunch break I started to work on a few bit's and bob's that I was trying to finish off the night before, all was going well until.... yup you guessed it. The same thing happened at work and I couldn't get on the server. Once again i tried everything and once again nothing worked and I couldn't even ping it. A quick trip onto the hosts support forum once again beckoned. By this time I was 99.9% sure I knew what the issue was but wanted to hear what they had to say and possibly get a solution to it.

When I got my reply it was exactly what I had been thinking, my ip was blocked. To fix this I would need to go into our main account via the hosts site. This meant getting my friend (it's his account even though we share the hosting) to get my ip's unblocked, which he did. A lot of hassle for pretty much nothing.

All of this got me thinking and I am pretty sure this all goes back to the issues with myphpadmin, I think when I am trying to do things via it, it may be dropping the connection or just going a bit mad and sending multiple requests to the server and as such it thinks I am trying to flood it with requests hence the blocking. So I had to find another way of doing my db data inserts and updates at the moment for the basic info for the site. As even my work around of just doing the SQL myself in MyphpAdmin had stopped working and was hanging like it was doing something when in actual fact it wasn't doing anything.

So I started to build a very very basic admin section, and as of close of play today I now have the ability to create new film entry's, edit them or existing ones, apply genre's to these films (still need to add a delete function to that) and the ability to set entries as live. Oh yeh I should mentioned I realised the other day that currently anything in the database is viewable, so if a entry has half of the information needed then it is visible and breaks the pages, for example if a film has been entered but has no genre's applied to it then it breaks other parts of the page as there are functions reliant on their being genre's for the film. I know that's bad coding as you should be able to catch these and deal with them if there are no genre's but at the moment the code on the pages are in a very basic for with no error detection or correction built in. As that's the last phase of these pages for me once I have allthe information sorted and am pulling out /displaying everything the way I want to.

Over the next few days I am going to work a little on this admin section as this will be used to build the final admin part for the site long term. If i can have all the basic functionality in there that I will need and have it working properly then thats half the battle done for when the site is done and live and I re-build the admin section.