Black Dougall:
OK, I contacted tech support at host for the third time. Gave them all the details. Tech said he put an order in and it worked. I checked my curltester and it's working now. Put in an order and it worked also. We are able to edit old orders.
My cynical side tells me they fixed something and don't want to admit it but who knows.
At least I'm armed with more knowledge if it happens again :)
Thanks to all for their replies and suggestions!
Very Strange!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I had the exact same problem and it started in August also. I have tried several things and also gone to paypal express instead of standard. Still same problem.
As for the search engine problem;
I discovered that googlebot's ip had been added to my htaccess file. Having always come up well on the search engines my site was suddenly none existant when I finally discovered why. I removed the ip addess and have come back up in the searches.
I still have not received an order notification since august. I have been getting paid for them but the site didn'r recognise any sales.
I just read this post and changed from paypal standard to paypal express and kept getting a 500 internal server error. I contacted my hosting company and got pretty much the same double talk, after about 20 minutes he said "wait I see something that may be causing it". Your account was forced to PHP5.2.
I asked why it was forced to 5.2 and he said that may have been standard when I first signed up ( it has been working for 2 years so probably not the case). He said "I removed it, try it again."
Long story longer...... It now works.
Anyone have any idea why my account would be "forced to php5.2"? I don't even know what that means really.
And anyone have an idea how googlebots IP got into htaccess file. Maybe I complained too much when the sites were down 3 times a day. Like a waiter spitting in your soup for complaining??