Life with GoDaddy

[Joe Kuhn]

After a long struggle with DreamHost I was completely locked out of my install of xf (Yes, I could not log in) and went to GoDaddy instead. Took me a couple of hours in between house chores to get it done. (uninstalled DreamHost site as agreed upon)

First mistake I made was to install WordPress so that when I tried to install xf, the server was looking for a wp page and wouldn't run index.php to do the xf install. A quick call to tech support and we got wordpress uninstalled. Since I have the cheapest plan, I'll have to upgrade to be able to do both, a forum and a website.

The tech who helped me suggested I get an ssl cert so the next day, I learned some things about that: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/redirect-http-to-https-automatically.144894/

Then I decided I wanted to stop typing the 'community' part of 'https://www.joekuhndesign.com/community' and set up forwarding. Then my browser said my site didn't exist at all. Had to delete and recreate my A record with help from tech support. I wanted to go

from https://www.joekuhndesign.com
to https://www.joekuhndesign.com/community

Site wouldn't come up at all even though the forwarding test tab said it would. Tech guy said my site didn't exist and wouldn't come up for him either although we could both go in with cPanel. I had to explain what I had done three times as forwarding is usually used to go from GoDaddy out. Oops. It's how we (I) learn.

All I can say is, I'm here to learn and not afraid to try stuff. Yes, there's a price to pay, but I call it tuition.

Got some learning to do: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/frequently-asked-questions.5183/#post-180455

 

[Joe Kuhn]

File Manager at the top has all permissions wide open, one down lower won't let me see my newly created .htaccess file that makes https happen all the time. Gr.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

Fellow member here told me about the cPanel redirects, which I will have to try after my site comes back in 24-48 hours. It looks different from GoDaddy forwarding. Bet it will go from my home directory "/" to "/community" like I want.

 

[fly]

If you have a problem that only GoDaddy can solve, you now have two problems.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

If you have a problem that only GoDaddy can solve, you now have two problems.

Not sure I get your point. Spell it out for me. I'm new in the field, although I have a whole career in t-sql programming, so I'm willing to compromise while I become familiar with the new turf.

 

[fly]

Not sure I get your point. Spell it out for me. I'm new in the field, although I have a whole career in t-sql programming, so I'm willing to compromise while I become familiar with the new turf.

Sorry, its my opinion that you could have selected a much better host. Moving from DreamHost to GoDaddy seems like out of the frying pan. There are several threads in this forum with much better suggestions...

If you're dead set on GD at this point, then ignore my posts - but I think you'll eventually regret it.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

Not dead set on anything, but some host has to get me to the point where it makes a difference and I can make an informed decision based on my own knowledge. For now it's gd. What might I regret? Fill me in. I'm interested and thanks for your note.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

Here's the screen where I set forwarding (mentioned above) and access to my site stopped and has not come back.



Chatted with gd support 24 hours after the record A change to tell them my trace route was giving me 6 timeouts. I sent them a copy of the results. Then I found https://dnschecker.org/ and noticed, last night, all sites were coming back with a green check mark. Not so this morning. This morning there's only 2 green check marks. The rest are red Xs. Support tech said he would take it to his mgr. Looks like his mgr may have made a change.

A member here suggested I move my xf install from my community directory up one level to the public_html directory. Too easy! Should make having to include 'community' in the url obsolete. So when my site comes back, I'll do that. Moral of the story: check here first. The @fly prediction seems to be coming true.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

Hah, hah. Just called tech support again and they suggested the contents of community be copied up one level to public_html. Did it for me and said to check it back in an hour. Said propagation looked fine to him.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

There's a reason why everyone with a lick of sense on this forum would tell you to stay far away from GoDaddy. If anyone ever recommends them, I would sincerely question their judgment.


Fillip

 

[CoZmicShReddeR]

The best overall is to build your own dedicated server host everything on your own!!

 

[Joe Kuhn]

There's a reason why everyone with a lick of sense on this forum would tell you to stay far away from GoDaddy. If anyone ever recommends them, I would sincerely question their judgment.


Fillip

I'm too new to know why. Can you at least give me some short explanations?

 

[Joe Kuhn]

The best overall is to build your own dedicated server host everything on your own!!

I like that idea. Once, long ago, I set up my own machine with a wiki for the Kuhn family. It didn't get used. Installed it at work and it became a nice internal documentation tool.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

I'm too new to know why. Can you at least give me some short reasons explanations?

Ask anyone who's ever worked customer support for a forum script like XenForo or vBulletin. They will immediately have PTSD-like flashbacks to the hundreds of tickets they've handled where GoDaddy configured their servers without required PHP extensions. Trying to explain to an entitled customer why it is, in fact, their web host that needs to "just fix it" and vBulletin / XenForo Support cannot "just fix it" for them makes a support agent wish Freddy Krueger was a real person and standing behind them.

Do you know what "overselling" means in terms of server hosting? If not, it is the practice of selling more disk space / bandwidth than the server can reasonably support.
For instance, if you have 1000 GB of disk space and 1000 GB of bandwidth for a server, you can sell 100 GB / 100 GB to 10 customers, right?

Wrong.

The vast majority of customers will not use 100 GB of disk space and 100 GB of bandwidth all of the time. Therefore, it is safe to sell 100 GB to 20 customers, since they estimate that 50 GB is the standard usage for that particular package.

This means that if your site grows to the point where you may actually need 100 GB of space, they are going to start sending you increasingly "helpful" emails about how your site is outgrowing the current package, why don't you consider this upgrade for ONLY $29.99 more a month because you're such a loyal customer?

What this actually means, when you strip away marketing speak, is "you are getting close to using what you paid for, and we don't like that." Of course they have to send emails like that, because if all 20 users started trying to use 100 GB, they have to upgrade the servers, which costs them money.

If you do not acquiesce to their totally-not-a-demand-just-friendly-customer-advice of upgrading to a more expensive package, they could be looking for an excuse to terminate your account. This excuse can be anything from a copyright violation to just "excessive resource usage".

Speaking of resource usage, another thing I didn't discuss above is the issue of CPU usage. The CPUs used in shared hosting is hardly going to be top-of-the-line, so the CPU resources are going to be limited. If you have 100 concurrent visitors (guests / spiders / registered users), even if your disk space / database space / bandwidth usage is within acceptable parameters, those 100 visitors are still going to take up CPU time.

Shared hosting does not feature dedicated CPU time, that's a feature reserved for VPS or Dedicated servers. In other words, if 20 sites have 100 concurrent visitors, the CPU may start struggling, slowing down the entire server for everyone. When a server slows down, some users may spam F5 to refresh, compounding the problem, until the entire server crashes.

All of this because you actually tried to use what you pay for.

This is the practice known as "overselling". GoDaddy and HostGator are two hosts I can think of that are the worst offenders for this practice. As a rule of thumb; the cheaper the host is, the larger the chance they are going to oversell.

Don't get me wrong, every host oversells, if they have any business sense, but the difference is how much they oversell. If you are paying $5 a month for 100 GB of disk space, they are going to oversell vastly more than if you pay $25 a month for the same amount of disk space. The incentive for overselling is, in theory, reduced the more the hosting package costs.
Of course you can have expensive hosts that also vastly oversell because why not double dip, but you can't know that without trying them out.

If you actually got to the end of this rant, you may feel slightly defeated and wondering "well I don't want to pay $200 a month for a low end dedicated server that's fully managed, so what can I do?"
As far as I'm aware, most people recommend @MattW for their managed XF hosting needs. I have not personally used their services but since their name gets dropped every time this topic comes up, I'd say it's probably a safe bet.

https://mattwservices.co.uk/resources/mattwservices-introduction.30/
https://mattwservices.co.uk/resources/categories/shared-hosting.9/

I am not affiliated with MattW in any way, shape or form and I am only providing those direct links to save the OP time having to hunt down the specific resource/categories on MattW's site.


Fillip

 

[Joe Kuhn]

Fillip - you don't know how much I appreciate your note. Back when I was trying to install with DreamHost I was told to bail on them based on the issues I was having but nobody ever gave me substantial details beyond my then current problems. I've heard of this guy MattW and feel I may be getting to know him in the future.

On the topic you broach, it's curious to me that an average usage hasn't become a selling point and my gosh, can't we get a plot of our usage so we can track what is going on and deal with it up front?

btw, just got off the phone with gd and the tech identified a missing CNAME record for www to @. So that's in now and with some propagation time, we 'should' be good.

I am learning quite a bit about this even with the problems. Doesn't mean I wouldn't learn as much if not more from MattW.

Thanks again.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

I am learning quite a bit about this even with the problems.

Encountering problems is how most of us learned what we know about server management

Personally, I wouldn't consider myself a server administrator (at least at the time of writing, who knows if I'll learn in the future), and as such I get servers with cPanel on them so I know what I'm doing. That doesn't mean there's never any problems, but with every problem I learn new things

Regardless of who or where your hosting adventure takes you in the future, you'll have one less problem you need to call tech support for


Fillip

 

[Joe Kuhn]

That last CNAME record did it. My site is back up. So where did that record go to in the first place? Hm. I thought to take screen shots of all those records to start with and didn't do it. Will have to do it now. Getting smarter every day.

This is a very strong community. Thanks Phillip. Glad I had a problem, to get to know you.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

DNS checker shows it's back world wide. I think I'll take the rest of the day off.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

I've found it better to call GoDaddy than to use Chat. And I've gotten better support during tha day than during off hours.

Next step is to change the forum to use the directory it starts in (public_html) rather than the community directory. I'll change that as the admin and see how it behaves. All files were temporarily copied up (not moved) in an attempt to get it working. Now i just want the files in public_html to be used. I'll rename community to community.bak and see if it works.