I recently tried switching my small business to a new hosting company, Neosurge. I hadn’t read any reviews other than the promotional advertisements that looked to be generated by Neosurge solutions themselves. As there were no negative reviews and the domain had been active under the same owner for a few years, I figured it well worth the try.

So I recently switched linux distros on my web server that hosts this wordpress blog. I tar’d up my wordpress files and dumped a database backup as well. I copied those files to my local machine and then performed the re-install. After the install, I imported the wordpress database, transferred back the wordpress files and all seemed to work well.

I noticed a day later that my wordpress permalinks were broken. All of the pages were displaying a 404 error. I confirmed that I had the apache mod_rewrite enabled and that the .htacess file was being re-written. I switched back to the default permalinks (?p=145) and the site worked as expected. For search engine optimization, however, I needed to figure out the custom wordpress permalinks issue. I tried a few wordpress plugins to resolve the missing permalinks with no solution to be found.