Support

February 14, 2022 at 12:11 pm

GoDaddy said they can’t completely turn off the caching on any of their shared hosting account, and that we’ll have to migrate the site to one of their business plans in order to eliminate caching.

That answer changes so often!

If we were to move the site to a different host, do you have a recommendation for an affordable one that would work with your system?

There isn’t really anything special about Event Espresso and it should work with any hosting, it’s caching that causes problems.

Caching is basically a way to reduce the load on the server, so if you go to /some-page/ then the webserver hits the database, pulls in all of the info for it and builds the page to send to the user. What caching does is sit right at the end of that and save the response… then sends that save response to the next requests for that page for a specific amount of time.

Sounds great, until you realise that any e-commerce type requests, (cart checkout, ticket registrations etc) all need to be unique to the specific user requesting it otherwise your not getting what you selected but something else from another user. That’s why the cache needs to be disabled and the error I mentioned above is from EE trying to build out the checkout page based on the data available to it, cached data or not it doesn’t know the difference.

We’ve seen users switching to DreamHost, BlueHost and WPEngine (they also have server-side caching but you can request it is disabled for specific pages) but really any hosting will do as long as they are flexible with what can and can’t be cached.

(Caching is advertised as a way to speed up your site and that it does, but it’s also a great way to reduce the load required per site on the server, meaning they can fit more sites on a single server, more profit per server. That’s a little simplistic, but you get the idea, its not all about whats best for you and your site)

February 14, 2022 at 12:16 pm

We list the details on: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/setup-nocache-exclusion-rules-event-espresso/

The default page slugs for EE4 are:

/events/
/registration-checkout/
/transactions/
/thank-you/
/registration-cancelled/

As long as you haven’t changed them excluding the above should be all you need to do.

February 14, 2022 at 12:35 pm

I can’t answer you here as I don’t have any control over what GoDaddy decide to do.

The reason I didn’t give you the above before is due to what I mentioned above.

We’ve been told by some reps the above is the correct method, others state it is not. That method was provided by one of their support techs for another user a while back, we advised people to use that method and all of a sudden users started getting hit with sites re-enabling the caching.

So, I’m not going to advise you do the above, you need to follow the steps GoDaddy provide for their servers. I’d like to give you a solid solution to this but its completely outside of our control and GoDaddy keep changing their mind on what is and is not an acceptable solution.