Kevin contacted us last week indicating he was having a problem with his website – Santa Fe Classic Limo. He had the website hosted with another provider and so he entered a ticket with them to try and get the website restored. It was showing a message saying ‘connection to database has failed’.
After their support was not able to help get the website fixed, Kevin asked us to step in and get the site fixed.
We worked on the site and discovered that this was not the usual problem. Typically that error message indicates that the username and/or password to connect to the database is wrong in the configuration – or the database name itself is wrong.
Not able to resolve the situation through that method, we performed a full backup of the website and database to be safe. A WordPress update was then completed to bring the site up to the newest version. This enabled us to remove all WordPress “core” files to be sure there wasn’t any compromised files in the process.
After the install was done, his website began showing a different error – that the current version of PHP was 5.4.4 on the server and it wasn’t compatible with WordPress. So, we then went into the hosting configuration and changed the version to the newest one. Upon doing so, critical errors started to be reported. Looking at the log files, it was due to old plugin files that were not compatible with the new version of PHP that was enabled. We then chose a prior version of PHP (7.4) and the website loaded. All of the plugins were upgraded successfully – then we were able to put it back on PHP 8.
Once the website was working, Kevin opted to have the website moved over to our website hosting so this doesn’t happen to him again. He indicated that there was a prospective customer that most likely was lost due to his website being down.
The site was moved over to our web hosting services last night and it is loading faster than it was on the other provider!
The website can be found at santafeclassiclimo.com.