Web Hosting for Direct Publisher

The number one error I see with WP Smart TV is a result of “budget” web hosting.   To make matters worse the hosting companies generally refuse to fix the error.

Why does this happen?

It can be quite a few different factors that block the JSON feed.   Sometimes the security systems do not recognize Roku’s ingestion system and block it from accessing your feed.

Other times the host writes over the “header” information of the page making it unreadable by Direct Publisher.

What can I do when this happens?

The first course of action is contact your hosting company and tell them what you are doing (Roku’s system needs to access a JSON feed from WordPress) and ask them to fix it.

Generally if you are on a “shared” hosting package (less than $10 per month), they will refuse to fix the problem as it goes beyond their Terms of Service.   It’s a fancy way of saying it would be to expensive to make changes for your needs.

If my host won’t fix the problem, what else can I do?

You have 2 options if your web host will not help.

First is to host the file on another service like Amazon S3 or a “free” JSON host.

This can be a major pain as you will have to download your JSON feed file from the WP Smart TV dashboard and upload it to your file host every time you add content.

The second option is to get better hosting, and the truth is if you want a professional channel that you can make a living from, you need to have good hosting.

Luckly, good hosting options exist at a descent price these days.  As far as hosting goes, 99.9% of VPS and Dedicated systems will work perfectly to run IPTV channels from.

WP Smart TV is guaranteed to work with 2 major platforms, WP Engine and DreamHost (excluding their shared plan).

WP Engine is for those of you that take your channel seriously and want to provide the absolute fastest user experience available.   I personally use them to host all my channels and can attest to their speed and amazing (yes, amazing!) tech support.

Before switching to WP Engine, I was a customer at DreamHost on their VPS plan.    All in all, the system worked flawlessly and for a good price.  My only complaint was that their tech support takes forever to answer support tickets (24 hours vs WP Engine’s 10 minutes).

If you need to skimp on hosting due to budget, it is a good place to start.

Conclusion

I hope that helps everyone understand the issue with your FeedURL not being ingested errors.   We are constantly looking for ways to overcome these limitations, so if you have any suggestions please let me know.

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