gunnerdo

Thanks for getting back to me first thing. You completely misunderstood the problem because I was completely inaccurate in describing it to you. My bad. Sorry for the confusion.

So just now, I contacted my hosting company support and explained the problem. The tech took a look and he was able to determine it was a db version compatibility issue. The hosting company’s default version of php is 7.1. My site is using 5.6. The tech was able to add a couple lines of code to force it to revert to 5.6 on opening. That took care of the problem and I am now able to accesss the site backend.

Which brings up the next question. I’m using an outdated version of php. How do I go about upgrading it?

Thanks again for all your help in figuring this out.

Ok Davood, Here’s the situation. The domain that is named the same as my business is DOMAIN1. ALL http requests coming in get redirected to domain2 which has a name chosen for SEO reasons. There are NOT 2 separate sites as I reported earlier. .htaccess file for DOMAIN1 is simply a 301 redirect as in ‘Redirect 301 / http://domain2.com/’ Therefore there is only 1 database connected domain2.

I backed up the web directory, backed up the .htaccess files in both DOMAIN1 and domain2 directories (.htaccess.bak) and then deleted both .htaccess files.

Since everything redirects to domain2, there is only 1 wpconfig file to check.

What’s the next step? It’s been a long time since I dug around under the hood but it’s coming back and I think with your guidance I should be fine. I am very grateful for your help.