S2member was working but now it does not

I have a install that is public and live. It has been working like it is suppose to for the last 3 weeks. Today however I am getting massive emails saying that their downloads act like they are going to work but instead they are redirected to a page I made saying

Hi “username”,
Looks like something is wrong here. If you know you have purchased the item you were looking for please email us here and we will look at your account for you.
Please give your name, email and what the item was so we can figure this out for you.

Even under the admin account we are getting the same error. I looked at the path and everything matches what it is suppose to match.

We have had issues with our server recently, for 3 days in a row at 9am PST to 11am PST has killed processes that are running in the background and in turn leaving our server offline. I am planning a move but need to know if there is a chance this could have caused this issue I am having. We were also having issues with other stuff too but I worked that out and s2member is the only thing left that is giving me issues.

I have created a temp account for anyone that would like to see what it is doing.
https://www.tracksidemodelrailroading.com/customer-login/

Username
s2member
Password
s2member2016

Once there you can go to the My Account and try to download this months Magazine.
Thanks for your input,
Ross Waters

I can’t say for certain what the cause is here, but I’d have suspected a hosting problem even without your mentioning it.

I noticed the htaccess file has a bunch of stuff in it and one is pointing to a directory that doesn’t exist.

This is in the root of the s2member-files directory.

Enable rewrite and configure base.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /~tracksi8/mr/

This was the server I built the site on, it now lives in a new location. Could this cause the issue?

Yes, Ross, absolutely!

Okay, I uninstalled s2member and all its settings then reinstalled it. It did upload a new htaccess file with the correct things I had updated it with from before. It still does the same exact thing. It just takes you to the member options page and in my case I placed a message to have user contact me.

After all this it still fails. I am losing faith in wordpress by the minute. I should have written my site in drupal.

I don’t understand why I would lose download function when I can protect pages with the same ccaps. either s2member works on all or it shouldn’t work for anything, at least that is my thought. Any advice outside of this?

I should clear the htaccess. I manually corrected the issue. that didn’t work so I then uninstalled it just in case I didn’t do it right. After the reinstall it looked just like my corrections.

I will say the only thing that was different with the corrections on the htaccess was it was counting the downloads where before it wasn’t, it would always say user has downloaded 0 or X and would never move away form 0.

Why would you expect s2Member’s functionality to be all or nothing? Different elements require different modules in Apache (or equivalent for nginx), so if your host has rendered one such module nonoperational, then that will stop one function working but not others.

I suspect the problematic choice you’ve made is not WordPress but your host. Who is it?

It is Hostgator Business Cloud, They said 3 of their users have been abusing the server and that is why mine is going down at the same time everyday. We’ll see if they resolve it or not.

I have looked into lightning base but for the SSL and the amount of monthly bandwidth traffic I can’t afford it currently. In the future I will move to them but for now I will need to stick to a service that is unlimited bandwidth.

I read that Varnishing Cache can cause problems with s2member, is this still the case? My host had that enabled as of this morning I have since turned it off.

Also, Jason if you read this thread, I cannot for the life of me use the upload zip option to install the pro version. I have to manually install it with FTP. Not sure if you know this but WP returns it as an invalid plugin. Not a big deal for me but it might be for some people.

I am once again going to rebuild my system and see if I can get s2member to work. not sure where it broke at and I think it will be faster to just install everything again cause at this point I will just end up losing customers if I don’t.

@rosswaters,

  1. Varnish is indeed not compatible with s2Member.
  2. The Pro version is supposed to be installed via FTP. See https://s2member.com/installation/
  3. Hostgator is owned by EIG. All EIG companies are problematic for use with WordPress.

Thanks for the input Tim.

I thought the first time I installed pro it it installed with the installer but that is fine if not.

I do have one question, we are expecting growth in the next 6 months. Would Inmotion be a decent choice for the next 6 or so months until we can afford a higher end server? I see they are not an EIG company. Also if I move the site to another host will that break s2member’s. I am sick of having constant problems.

Ross

Ross,

Moving the site shouldn’t break anything if you or your new host uses the right tools. I have found that relying on cPanel to clone a site with s2Member doesn’t work too well; it seems to mangle the necessary javascript. But there are plenty of good plugins that can be used to do the job successfully.

I don’t have direct experience of Inmotion, and I have hardly seen it mentioned on s2Member support threads over the last few years, so I really can’t offer an opinion on how good it might be. I do suggest, though, that you ask what versions of PHP and MySQL they run. If the versions they use are very old, then you will definitely have problems.

I have a client on Inmotion, WP works well.

I use the Pro version of Duplicator pro for my WP Backups, with that work for s2member.

Thanks for the advice.

I haven’t used that for years, but I’d expect that it would work.