For the last couple of years, I switched hosting of my main site (this one) to another hosting provider – BlueHost. However, in the last few months of my time with them, the level of service slipped considerably, to the point where large portions of my site would often disappear or fail to work properly. I switched back to NFS recently, and I’m so glad I did. Their hosting is quick, reliable, and affordable.

However, as I mentioned, it really is a bare bones solution. There’s no cpanel here. They wont install WordPress, etc, for you. You need to roll up your sleeves and get geeky in the terminal.

The biggest issue i’ve faced since moving my site back to NFS, is the inability to upgrade plugins successfully through the dashboard using WordPress 2.7. Every time I try to upgrade a plugin, I get a set of warnings along the following lines during reactivation:

Warning: include_once(/f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-content/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: Inappropriate ioctl for device in /f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-settings.php on line 473

Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘/f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-content/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/nfsn/apps/php5/lib/php/:/nfsn/apps/php/lib/php/’) in /f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-settings.php on line 473

It also squirts these warnings into the top of my webpages. Not good! The only way I could work around this warning was to deactivate the plugin, then delete the plugin, and then reinstall the plugin. What a mess.

Although I’ve not yet found a fix as such, I have found a decent workaround, which is far easier and quicker than any of the other suggestions I’ve come across:

1. Deactivate the plugin
2. Upgrade the plugin
3. Activate the plugin

Seems simple enough, but this is the only consistent way I’ve found of upgrading plugins and avoiding the warning messages. If anyone else has any suggestions, please leave me a comment as I’d be grateful to hear about them.

UPDATE 15/06/2009: This workaround seems to work very intermittently for me. However, I have noticed a much greater success rate if the ‘all in one SEO pack’ is deactivated EVERY time I try to upgrade ANY plugin.