ASP.NET Programmer

WordPress Running Slow on GoDaddy

I don’t know what it is, but for the past week all my blogs have been running dog slow on GoDaddy. All my other sites (ASP.NET based) run fine. I contacted support and I got the ever so unhelpful “this problem is something on your side” or my personal favorite “you need to upgrade your account to a dedicated server.” What? You can’t support a measly blog, and you want me to shell out major bucks for a dedicated server? Not happening. After doing some investigation on the web, nothing could be further from the truth. Many, many, many people are having these slow crawling load times when running WordPress on GoDaddy. The solution — find another web host. Seriously, out of the four web forums I scoured no one had run across a solution past jumping ship.

The one host that kept coming up time and again in my research was Bluehost. Even WordPress themselves had Bluehost listed first on their list of recommended web hosts. Everyone kept saying their support was great and load times were very quick. I just got setup yesterday with them, and I’m busy pulling over files and setting up databases. I’ll check back in to let you know how it goes.

Update [8/27/09]: One week on BlueHost, and I’m happy to confirm that all blogs are zipping right along. No delays, no unbearable load times, none of that Godaddy crap. The problem definitely wasn’t on my end. You’d think they’d be able to at least run a little WordPress blog. Guess I expect too much. As far as the transition over to BlueHost, it was fairly painless. Basically, you just export your mySQL database to a file comprised of a bunch of SQL statements. After creating the cooresponding database on your BlueHost mySQL account, you just import the SQL file and all your data is up. Then just download all your blog files and restore them to the new folder location you’ve setup for the site on BlueHost. Next you need to point the wp-config.php file to the new database as follows:

Your final step is just to go into your domain provider and point the DNS record to go to BlueHost. The DNS servers you are looking for are primary NS1.BLUEHOST.COM and backup NS2.BLUEHOST.COM. Then you just have to wait for the changes to propogate through the Internet’s hub routers. I’ve seen it take as quick as five minute to a couple of hours. No rhyme or reason to it. Whalah you’re setup and you’ve left Godaddy’s interminable crawl in the past.

Oh with regards to support, BlueHost was very responsive. I submitted 4 requests as I was getting setup and they were normally back to me within 30 minutes to an hour via email, and I didn’t get a single boneheaded answer that was cut and pasted out of the knowledgebase that had absolutely nothing to do with my issue. Of course that was the norm with Godaddy’s hosting support and many other hosts I’ve used in the past. Very satisfied so far with the whole hosting experience at BlueHost.

Webhost4Life Web Hosting Sucks

Let me tell about the week I have had, all courtesy of the incompetent techs running Webhost4life hosting service. The week starts with my Movable Type admin panel being mysteriously unavailable. The main site is still up mind you, but no way to actually edit or post anything. So the support request goes in, and they first try to change the main cgi file over to a pl file thus triggering a mountain of errors. Their response to this was, “can you figure out what all these errors are about?” You dumb idiot. You changed the file extension. This has worked as is for the past 4 years. Why do you now think changing the file extension is the answer? So another tech changes it back to cgi and gets me in. Great, but when I go to publish nothing has write access. A day goes by and now I can write to one directory, but not another. Still basically can’t post. Another day goes by, and I’m back to normal. Not so fast sparky. I get a seperate email that morning saying that they’ve switched servers on me overnight and so all my ODBC connections are now on the fritz. The site has effectively been offline for hours. It would have been nice to send me the email the day before so I could have the code gracefully fall over to the new server. Now that that is fixed, none of the image files work even though they are full qualified urls. Incompetance like this has to be rewarded. I’ve spent the last day pulling all the data down off the WebHost4Life server and loading it up to Godaddy. I’ve also put the blog on WordPress which makes my life so much easier. Moveable Type was a headache and a pain in the ass. Five years ago there wasn’t much better out there though. So that was my week.

Truthfully if this was WebHost’s first f$&k up, I could probably give them another chance, but this seems to be a perpetual issue. The site will go down for a couple to 10 minutes at a time then be right back up. No one has an explanation for what caused the hiccup. I keep running into file upload buffer limits where they have to clear something on their side. They always seem to be changing servers or screwing with something that breaks my site. Logically if you are going to have everyone point to the e drive as the web root, wouldn’t you maintain that drive letter when you relocated it to a new server? I know this is way too logical. The biggest irritant is just that they are never on top of things. They let issues sit for days at a time before responding. Customer support is not a high priority.

Please do me a favor and never use Webhost4life for your web host. You’re just asking for trouble.

GoDaddy Error: Domain name is used. Please select a new domain name.

I just purchased a new domain. Got everything transferred over into my goDaddy account, yet when I went into the Domain Management console to attach the domain to my Linux hosting account I got the error message, “Domain name is used. Please select a new domain name.” From looking at my account, everything had transferred over correctly from the seller. Upon contacting goDaddy support I discovered that the seller needed to remove the domain from their hosting account before I could add it to my own. You’d think that once the transfer had happened, it would automatically disassociate itself from the hosting account. Not so.

[UPDATE : 5/12/09] Evidently this is more common than I thought. Completely separate from this original post, I registered a dropped domain about a month ago through GoDaddy. I just got around to building it out today. When I went to set it up in the my hosting panel again I get our familiar error “Domain name is used. Please select a new domain name.” Upon talking to my account rep, if the previous owner of the domain hosted it on GoDaddy prior to its release this error will trigger same as them transferring it directly to you. I’ve never met this guy, but he’s basically holding this domain hostage until GoDaddy convinces him to release it. How does it not get automatically released on expiration? Makes no sense.