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Just a quick overview of what took this site down:
One day the site was just suddenly broken. When Heidi got me involved I contacted HostGator and they were basically no help.
It seemed like they were trying to blame the problem on the vBulletin software which of course was never the problem.
Frustrated with HostGator I tried to get a server going with a different hosting company called Kamatera. After almost 2 weeks of working on that, long story short, they were unable to help me when I ran into trouble installing the PHP version that we needed, namely PHP 5.6.
As that was happening I was still trying to get a help from HostGator and thankfully so because I was able to get through to someone from HostGator who said that the problem was with our server and that they could help if we purchased a new server. And we jumped on that.
From there it only took a few hours to transfer the site from the old server to the new server, and for the site to be back up and running.
The hiccup that came a few days later was a DNS issue but now that is resolved as well.
Since then I did some other tweaking as well. I fixed the character encoding. For some reason it was set wrong for what appears to be the last 17 years.
It was declared as ISO-8859-1 but in reality it was UTF-8 which meant that it wasn't displaying properly.
I also fixed a few other things like the chat which was designed to work with an older version of PHP. I just had to update the code a little to work with PHP 5.6.
And I enabled gzip. and Cloudflare. among other things.
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