You're paying them money to break your website at random intervals. Why wouldn't it be reasonable to ask them to stop? If they aren't bending over backwards to help you troubleshoot this, then you should be in the market for another hosting provider.

I'm not a cpanel user, but from the googling I've done it seems that the culprit is a script called update_php_mime_types.

This script can be disabled. Ask them why they haven't done that. Presumably they have a good reason, and will share it with you, and you can use that info to help you move forward.

The script's purpose is to make .htaccess files match up with the configuration selected in the cpanel options for a user's account. Is PHP turned off in your user configuration? Another thing to find out.

http://www.cpanel.net/documentation/easyapache/ea3php_php_customize.html

If you keep hitting a wall with them, there are a million hosting providers out there.

The fact that I'm not seeing any bleating about the problem in Steadfast's forums suggests to me that the cpanel options for your account might need to be tweaked. Cpanel is used everywhere so if this were a common issue, the Internet would know about it.

I don't think the script is broken, so if it's doing what it is supposed to do, the trick is to figure out why what it's supposed to do and what you want it to do aren't lining up.

I've got the directives on how to handle PHP files set up in the main Apache config files on my home server, and the host I use for my low-traffic web site also has PHP handling set up by default, so I haven't had to do much messing around with .htaccess files. However, if you can set up cron-jobs on your server then there might be a workaround that'll at least minimise your downtime.

First, make a copy of your .htaccess file called htaccess.bak. You can do this from a shell login by typing 'cp .htaccess htaccess.bak'. Then, create a new file and copy/paste the following text into it:

#! /bin/bash

if [ -n "`diff .htaccess htaccess.bak`" ]; then

	cp -f htaccess.bak .htaccess;

fi

Note that this is a bit of a kludge and really isn't an ideal solution, but it should keep your downtime to a minimum until you can implement a better fix.

You know, that cpanel thing suggested by the earlier posters is probably the problem. Try that first. My solution could potentially be more trouble than its worth.

So, cpanel doesn't like that AddHandler line, but they can't tell you why? And it's your job to figure it out?

That sounds like baaaad tech support to me. They should know these things.

Most likely there's a syntax problem that would be easily fixed if they could tell you how cpanel prefers things.

I wish I knew more about apache and cpanel to give you more than that. I do notice that you have the .html extension twice in that line. Is that necessary? That sort of thing might bother a script...

One recommendation I've seen is to use two separate hosting providers and keep the site updated on both simultaneously. If you do that, and use a managed DNS provide like www.no-ip.com, you'll always have a backup ready to go automatically within minutes of a failure at your primary hosting service.

I'm not technical enough to explain just how that would work out in practice for your site, but apparently it's being done by more and more mid to low traffic sites that want to avoid being taken offline for any extended time. There are probably ways to automate the whole process, so you don't have to update twice by hand every time you change the site.

Yeah, I was gonna email you with some suggestions, but I figured you were probably going out of your mind with frustration (been there). Bottom line is, you should not even need that line in your htaccess... apache should be serving HTML files as HTML all by itself (I know on my computer I was suddenly downloading your pages to a temp directory and displaying them from the local drive).

Anyway, you're right to expect them to fix it. Looks like they did... ?? :)

Newbs, that line doesn't do what you think it does.

That AddHandler line tells Apache to run .html files through PHP before rendering. Which most certainly IS required for a dynamic, database-driven system like a blog engine.

This is why I hate .htaccess, it never does what I think it does. :)