Recently we migrated one of our sites to the Hostgator Cloud servers.  Things went pretty smooth, except that we faced a peculiar issue.

While trying to navigate to our support desk which is powered by osTicket, the browser started downloading the web page instead of opening it.

downloading-not-opening

We tried searching online but none of the answers fixed our issue. Yeah, Stack Exchange didn’t work this time.

Given my experience of web mastering sites for several years, when any peculiar issue arise, I first try to look into .htaccess files used by the erring applications.

Indeed this turned out to be the culprit.

The .htaccess file used by osTicket was using PHP 5.3

# Use PHP 5.3
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

while the script demands at least PHP 5.4

We simply went ahead and changed the handler to PHP 5.6 and the issue got resolved.

# Use PHP 5.6
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php56 .php

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