All the bloggers start out small. You won’t start blogging by paying over $20 for hosting per month. So, you go for cheap shared hosting. That is a very nice solution but it has a small problem. You don’t get to have a console access to the machine that your blog is hosted (except for BlueHost and a few others). Although in most cases you won’t care about it, there are a few times where such an access is more than valuable and time saving.

The most common problem with a blog powered by WordPress, is not being able to use the automatic update. When trying to access it, it asks for a username and password of the FTP/SFTP to use in order to update. That of course ruins the simplicity of the automatic update. This problem is caused by the file permissions on the server. When you open an FTP connection to your site, with a major FTP client, you must see a column there with the file permissions. Those must be set, so as to give the web server the permission to write on your files. That is done by adding “write” permission to the group. When you don’t have ssh access to your Linux powered server, that can be troublesome. Using the FTP client will take too long, so you end up updating by hand. Here comes the powerful “exec” command.

This actually is a PHP function that the argument you pass, it passes it down to the operating system. So, if you wanted to change the file permissions in bulk, without using your FTP client, here is what you will need to do. First, create a PHP script with your favorite text editor (i recommend notepad++) containing the following:

<?php
	exec("chmod -R 775 ./");
?>

Then save it, naming it for instance “foo.php“. Upload this file to the root of your WordPress installation directory. Finally, invoke the script by visiting the page “http://www.yoursite.com/foo.php“. Voila! This should have taken care of the file permissions. Try out the auto update function now…

One more thing that is painful is the backup. The modern websites nowadays consist of hundreds or even thousands of small files (scripts, images etc). This makes it very hard for an FTP client to backup since, it has to send at least a batch of three commands to the server in order to get one single small file. Then visit each sub-folder and again and again… Even if your connection with the server is very speedy, the backup process this way will be extremely slow. In order to speed the process up, you can archive the whole site in one single file and then download that one. That would be very fast. Again, without a console, things are a bit hard. But, “exec” comes to the rescue again. You can use the above process. Create a script file containing:

<?php
	exec("tar -cf backup.tar ./");
?>

That’s it! Upload and run. This will create a file called “backup.tar” on the root directory of your blog. Just download it! Now, there are two things i’d like to point out:

1. There is a possibility of the execution time of the script running out before getting the job done. In that case you can archive each directory on it’s own. That will save some time.
2. The compression on the .tar is not as high as expected. Actually it’s not good at all. In order to compress it better you can use the .bz2 format by converting the above script to the following:

<?php
	exec("tar -cjf backup.tar.bz2 ./");
?>

That will highly compress it but it will consume more time (see point 1).

One final thing that seems to be taking a lot of time is folder deletion. For the same reason as backup, deleting a folder and all it’s contents through FTP, can be time consuming. The client has to visit each folder issuing a command for each file, waiting for a response. That takes much more time than issuing an “rm” command from the console. On shared hosting, you guessed it, exec comes to the rescue. Let’s say you want to delete the folder “bar” which has a lot of subfolders in it with many files. Here is a script that can do the job:

<?php
	exec("rm -rf bar");
?>

Be very very careful with this one fellas. The “rm” commands means “remove” and the “-rf” option means “recursively and force“. In other words, if you don’t use the right folder name, something can go extremely wrong (for instance using ./ would delete all the contents from the current folder).

When you are done with your maintenance be sure to delete those command scripts, just in case someone stumbles on them and decides to check them out. All in all, this process will save you a lot of time of maintenance on shared hosting, i know it saved me!

Photo by ryancr