havenswift-hosting

We are a specialist CubeCart hosting company and host quite a few regulars on these forums. We offer free CubeCart support as part of our E-Commerce hosting packages and as well as tuning our servers for CubeCart (including offering the use of the new REDIS caching or Memcached which nobody else offers) and will also move your site over to us free of charge. If you would like any answers to any specific questions, drop me a PM or contact via our website

I have seen that still working but also had times when clearly it didnt work - recent upgrades to the forum software appear to have caused lots of irritating little changes / issues

lol - I wasnt suggesting that it was a good idea at all, just that CN, UA, VN, RU are all towards the top of the countries where these types of problems come from. Besides by far the highest number of incidents come from US anyway - there are a lot of script kiddies in US but most people from other countries know that you cannot simply block US like this and route their traffic through proxies in US / UK / DE etc

That PHP Notice is 100% from our Category Product Options plugin but as Alec has said, it will not cause any problems at all. The issue is annoying as it fills up the error_log file but it wont be causing any issues and if you are no longer running that plugin and you are having problems with one of Daren's then that message is not related

I agree that it shouldnt be the recommended choice https://github.com/cubecart/v6/issues/1543 Using Replace forces you to think more about creating the content and the correct meta data but you do need to know your target keyword phrases. You need to choose whether you want to use www. (we generally setup all our customers this way - if it is good enough for Google to use themselves !) or not and then add the correct 301 directives to your .htaccess file You shouldnt need to do that if you have the 301 directives in place and working correctly. We also have HSTS configured on our servers which helps with SSL as well.

I have split your posting plus the reply from @bsmither into a new thread. There are any number of ways at the server / hosting side of things that should already be preventing this type of thing but it sounds like your hosting company doesn't have these configured. A DDoS attack like this coming from a single IP address should never be allowed through the server security. For clarity, are these customer login attempts or attempts to login to admin ? What version of CubeCart are you running ? Ian

Merge is a very poor choice because it uses the same global meta data on every single page and will add that to whatever is entered on each individual page (which many people then dont do leading to every single page having exactly the same meta title and description) but as you are limited to 66 characters for the title, if you enter 66 or more characters in the global setting and use merge, you still end up with the same 66 characters for every single page - meta titles should be unique for every single page on the site and should contain a few selected keywords that are good for your site and relevant to the content of the page. Point 2 is also extremely important and something most people dont look at Point 4 - if your site is domain.com then http://www.domain.com ; http://www.domain.com/index.php ; http://domain.com and http://domain.com/index.php will all return the same content but Google treats them as different website pages and hence four duplicate content pages. Add in incorrectly formatted https behaviour (which should happen with CubeCart now if SSL is switched on but I have seen poorly configured server settings causing problems as well even then) then double that to eight pages. You say that when searching for products you have better rankings than the homepage - that totally depends on what search terms you are using (hence the vital importance of point 2 !!) and if you are searching for a product then finding the product page is exactly what you want ! Did you add a 301 redirect when removing the .html file - unfortunately a massive mistake if you didnt and unless it was done in the last few weeks, then it is probably too late for that. A lot depends on what content was on that page in comparison the the store homepage now and what searches you are doing (back to point 2 yet again but this is the most important aspect which most people dont even look at !).

This is quite common with PayPal but strangely (!) whenever you speak with them, they will always say their systems are working perfectly and blame everything else (hosting, the application, emails going into spam, your internet). As much as it is a pain, all stores should always check directly in PayPal (and all payment gateways really) to verify payments, especially when shown as Pending

Almost impossible to say without an in depth examination of your site but a few key pointers : 1) For good SEO never use Merge - it should not be the recommended method. Always use "Replace" and then ensure that all documents, categories, products etc have unique meta title and description (dont waste any time on keywords as not used) 2) Know what your 50 to 100 target keyword phrases are and write content and meta information to suit (this is the hard part !) 3) Register with Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools) and check all errors and warnings and fix where indicated. Create a good sitemap both for pages and for images on a regular (weekly is fine for most stores) basis and submit to Google and Bing 4) Ensure you dont have duplicate content - most commonly found on the homepage where most stores have at least four different urls displaying the same content. 5) Always use a SSL - Google are already ranking SSL sites slightly higher but during this year will increase that even more and are already prominently highlighting sites with logins that arent secure 6) Ensure your site is using microdata - https://www.cubecart.com/extensions/plugins/google-schema-org-microdata-plugin 7) Dont create situations where 404 errors are happening - always use 301 redirects - Google doesnt like them and you are losing link juice

There is no need for a plugin - CubeCart does this as standard - see Product Options. You can have multiple different options such as a range of sizes plus a range of colours and even auto-generate the whole options matrix of all possible combinations

If the error_log is that big and growing that quickly, then simply rename that to something else and wait while a new error_log is generated

Yes it should do but recent upgrades done via admin have been causing a LOT of problems so I strongly advise you to upgrade manually - I have written a set of steps in another reply recently. It looks like upgrade issues should be fixed from 6.1.6 onwards

A manual upgrade isnt too much work and I would very strongly recommend that you do an upgrade as soon as possible as there are several serious security issues in all versions below 6.1.5

That is one approach but you could and should also include UA, CN, VN and a few others. However, it is an option with diminishing returns, as blocking that many IP addresses slows server firewall performance down as much as or more than than allowing script kiddies from these countries through ! It is also trivial to spoof an IP address or route traffic through a constantly changing set of proxy addresses based in countries that you cannot block. DB connection errors indicate an overload of connections to the MySQL server but how these are dealt with is very specific to each and every incident

Look in images/source directory and delete any index.html, index.php or index.htm file

You need to look at better hosting - your current hosting package is not working well

If you are having DB connection errors that is probably because the settings on your hosting server are set to reject connections above a certain number - the fact that you are seeing a large number of connections from Russian IP addresses shows you are probably under some sort of attack that your hosting isn't the dealing with very well

The automatic upgrade is totally unreliable at the moment ! However if you do a manual upgrade and ensue that you copy all files from /admin directory to your renamed admin_xxxxxx directory and copy the admin.php file over the admin_xxxxxx.php file them the upgrade works perfectly

This isnt a change within the last couple of days - that functionality disappeared a few weeks ago but is very annoying

Not being able to connect to the MySQL is a major hosting related issue and can often mean that your server is overloaded. If MySQL isn't working properly, then many / most things in your store will not work so that needs sorting first. Are you sure that your database settings are correct in the global.inc.php file ? Ian

Removing APC is a server level change and not trivial, so for them to not know what happened or have record of changes to your hosting should be very concerning ! While you got your store working again by following the instructions to change which caching method it uses, it didn't actually fix the issue, just by-passed it

The ability to mark a forum as completely read also disappeared !

You are very welcome although would be interesting to find it why that suddenly failed. If it used to work and you haven't changed anything, then it is probable that godaddy either removed APC from your server or moved your account to a different server that didn't have APC installed. Either way, something they shouldn't have done without notifying you

Did godaddy confirm whether you have APC installed on the server ? Have you checked which caching method your store is set to use (Store Settings | Advanced tab). If you edit the includes/global.inc.php file you can change it from using APC to any of the other supported caching methods (https://support.cubecart.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/235/41/how-do-i-enable-apc-memcached-redis-or-xcache) - "file" will definitely work although is the slowest method by far Ian

There are a couple of other threads in these forums asking the same thing but the best way is to use phpMyAdmin to add, delete or correct each one as appropriate to your errors - each site can possibly have different issues so no one set list of corrections Ian