Yes, so my client’s website is still on GoDaddy basic Linux hosting and the dreaded message showed up after upgrading several plugins. It most likely had nothing to do with upgrading the plugins and everything to do with GoDaddy hosting.

Here’s the message, slightly cleansed to protect the hosting…

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(/home/content/ / /tmp/sess_, O_RDWR) failed: No such file or directory (2) in /home/content/ / /html/wp-content/plugins/cforms2/cforms2.php on line 89

First, I tried killing and restarting the system processes on my hosting control panel. No help. Finally today I had some time to chat with GoDaddy support after trying some various fixes which didn’t work. One writeup suggested asking support to clear the hosting cache. So that’s how I started the chat with GoDaddy support.

The chat rep looked at my hosting and the error message and tried blaming the cforms plugin. I asked him to clear the cache area (tmp area) on the hosting space. He replied that everything looked great and proceeded to upsell me on a higher tier of hosting (cPanel hosting). I told him not to waste his time with the upsell, that I felt that decent hosting should maintain the servers at a reasonable level.

After ending the chat I did some more research and found this post at WallyDavid which really helped. I was already bumping around the session.save_path setting in my php.ini file but with no luck. The secret really is to create a new temp folder within your hosting space, create the new php5.ini file and update it accordingly. You can find the full path to your hosting space on the main account panel screen (left nav below the fold) “Absolute Hosting Path”. After you create the new temp folder, create the php5.ini file and update it, go back to the hosting control panel, select System Processes and click ‘stop all’. Access your site in another window and check to see that the ugly error message has gone away.

(Thanks, Wally David for the great writeup, hope you’ll enjoy a few visits to your blog on me!)