Tag Archive for godaddy

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

I Need A Sponsor for My Site…

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tg

So I’m on GoDaddy hosting and when you buy one of their hosting plans they advertise unlimited storage but apparently they’ve taken a page from cellular companies and their unlimited isn’t really unlimited at all.

TestFreaks the Blog closed, they decided to focus on the business to business aspect of things and they basically gave me the blog but I had to change the name and we came up with Technogog, which is fine. To get started I picked a GoDaddy shared hosting account, one of the middle tiers and I upload my site and got a warning that I was running out of resources and so I spent the money and upgraded the server to resource level 3 from the default thinking that might solve my problem. More ram, dual CPU etc and it didn’t fix the issues apparently.

I found out that there’s some fine print I didn’t read, and GoDaddy doesn’t have an asterisk by the ‘unlimited storage’ that they advertise but I found the fine print and I found out that there’s a limit of 250,000 files and folders you can have on the server, which I’m at about 211,000 right now. I called then to see what I can do and the guy I talked to was actually very helpful and I need to move to a new server it seems but I don’t have the money as I’m not making money since the server can’t handle the site now. (decent servers are expensive and at this point in time I would be paying more than I’m actually making and can’t do that) The site crashes every time I post something now, it’s annoying. Having a site and not having it be able to be visited can be a problem when it comes to making any money from it.

Since I don’t have any money to upgrade I wonder how hard it would be to get someone to sponsor my site? I’ve never looked into it but I’ve learned it’s possible.

I was looking into new hosting providers and found that Namecheap actually has a sponsorship program but it says it can take several weeks for them to review the submission. Yeah I get it, they’re busy, but I need a server now so I can actually post content so I can get visitors so I can maybe make some money.

I don’t know, this is just a rambling post I guess, just complaining, but I’m allowed as it’s my site, but as of now I don’t know what to do unless I come into some money.

If I stayed with GoDaddy they have specific WordPress hosting without the files and folders limitations.  Right now they have a special on it for the middle tier of just $9.99 per month, it’s regularly $19.99 per month. So if I had about $120 I could get it for a year but I’m worried as there is a limit of 250,000 monthly visitors. I’m not sure what my exact visitor count per month is right now as I thought a plugin was the issue with the site so I didn’t have Google analytics on for a few days and of course the site being down all the time doesn’t help either. According to the Cpanel metrics on  GoDaddy for the site I got about 190,000 visitors in December and as of yesterday it’s a little over 170,000 visitors. So that middle tier wouldn’t work as it only has a 250,000 limit so I would need the highest level which is on sale for $29.99 per month which is regularly $69.99 per month so I would need at least $360 for a year of hosting to be locked into that price. That level of hosting says ‘millions’ of visitors per month, whatever that means, but it’s better than a 250k limit right?

I wonder if I could get an advertiser or sponsor for this, and it doesn’t have to be GoDaddy hosting of course, that was just an example.

If I could like sell a couple advertising spots for like $500 per year that would be awesome, I could lock in the price and pay for a couple/few years in advance with that GoDaddy WordPress hosting. Any takers?  A nice 300×250 sidebar banner ad?

I don’t know what to do at this point…  blah…

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

GoDaddy Has Disabled XMLRPC Remote Posting and Decided NOT to Tell Anyone

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This is a bunch of BS. I haven’t been able to post remotely since Sunday to any of my GoDaddy hosted sites and I thought maybe it was something I did, nope it’s not.

I used Windows Live Writer for all my sites, on GoDaddy and not on GoDaddy, it works great and it’s just much easier to use than the WP back end.

I’ve been trying to figure out the problem since Monday as to why I couldn’t post, I’ve probably spent at least 15 hours of my time trying to figure it out and it had nothing to do with me at all.

GoDaddy has disabled XMLRPC remote posting on their hosting accounts and just decided NOT to tell any of their customers.

What pisses me off the most is that the support rep told me that they don’t have an automated system in place to let their customers know of important issues like this, but yet they do have an automated system that sends me 1-2 emails everyday with offers and trying to get me to spend more money with them. That makes no sense at all. They can send out all these spammy offers but they can’t send out something that’s actually important and affects their customers?

I’ve been with them for almost 10 years now I believe, January 2005 was when my first site went up with them if I recall correctly and it’s time to go. This is not how you treat your customers. You do not make significant changes and NOT tell them about it, that’s just wrong. So I’m in process of backing up all my sites now and I guess I’m going to spend the day researching hosting companies.

I’m so infuriated right now at them. I don’t understand how they can NOT tell their customers about something that’s actually important. I have to wonder how many others out there are like me and have been spending hours trying to figure out what was wrong with their sites on their own and just wasting their time.

Oh any they have no idea when it might be enabled again.

On a side note, here’s another thing that GoDaddy did and didn’t tell anyone, there’s now no way to email GoDaddy support. The support rep told me they got rid of it because phone and chat support were ‘better’ for their customers. Really I had to sit and wait with the chat window open for about 15 minutes before someone finally came on to help me. I could have just typed an email and send it along in under a minute probably. If you’re going do do something like that then why not have a toll free number at least?

 

Rants!

Site Down- Thanks for Blaming me GoDaddy!

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So my site Review the Tech is down and has been down since who knows when. Well it was working yesterday, but sometime between yesterday and today it went down. It’s up and down intermittently, and when it is up it’s not up for long. A few seconds at most.

The issue is with GoDaddy servers apparently.

I called them this morning because I couldn’t email them via their support form on their website.

I called and basically I was blamed for the problem. I was told that it was most likely one of my plugins that was causing the issue. I was told to deactivate my plugins and see what happens. I was also told that I shouldn’t keep any plugins that I don’t have active, I should delete them.

After speaking for a while and troubleshooting he went and talked to someone else and said yes there was a slight issue with a couple of their nodes, but it shouldn’t be affecting my site this way and he still thinks it was one of my plugins that was causing the problem. So that was a 35 minute phone call that ended with me thinking it was pretty much my fault and one of my plugins was causing my site to crash.

Six hours later, and too many attempts to login I finally got all of the plugins shut off. This took me all day basically, because I could disable one and then the site would error out and have to restart the process all over again.

Anyway, six hours later I decided to do some searching and hit the GoDaddy forums where I found everyone is complaining about their sites being down for days now. It’s a known issue, so why not tell me that in the first place?

They knew about the problem but yet essentially blamed me for my site being down. They said it was probably because of my plugins, when this was plainly NOT true. They knew they were having issues, but yet still blamed me. I don’t understand that at all.

How is it my fault that your having issues with your server?

Why blame the customer?

Why lie to the customer?

Why not just tell the truth?

So basically I spent all day fiddling with the site, deactivating and deleting my plugins when I didn’t have to do any of that. If I would have been told the truth the first time I wouldn’t have had to waste my time.

Rants!

GoDaddy Crashed My Website and Won’t Admit it!

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So I went to bed last night with a fully functioning website, I woke up this morning with one that looked like this:

site

Yeah I think there is something wrong there.

I spent hours trying to figure it out, I thought maybe I was hacked. I know I didn’t do anything to it to make this happen. So after hours searching I find that it’s a PHP problem and these errors only show up with Mambo CMS when you try and use PHP 5.3.6 with it as it’s not compatible.

I knew I didn’t change the PHP version so I emailed GoDaddy support and they told me no we didn’t do anything it must be something you did.

So after some time messing with the code I got access to the backend of the site and did some snooping around and I found my site is using PHP 5.3.6 !!!

Here’s a screenshot:

php536

I’ve sent GoDaddy support this screenshot five times now and they still keep telling my that no I’m not running that version of PHP and they keep sending me some copy and paste response. They will not acknowledge the fact that they update the PHP without my knowledge, they should have told me they were going to do this.

Here’s the PHP info where you can plainly see I’m running PHP 5.3.6:

I have numerous emails where they insist that I’m NOT running PHP 5.3.6! Really? Then how the fuck do you explain that what I have above?

I mean seriously I get tons of spam email crap from GoDaddy about all kinds of offers, they couldn’t have let me know about something important like this?!

What pisses me off the most is that I lost $100 in advertising income because of this, I was planning on putting that aside and buying my kids their school supplies with it.

Not to mention of course the other income I am losing as well because the site isn’t exactly in working order.

GoDaddy will not admit they did anything wrong, when it plainly shows right there that I’m running PHP 5.3.6. I did not upgrade it to that, so someone else did. I highly doubt that someone hacked into my account and changed the PHP version so that leads me to they did something on their end.

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

GoDaddy Sucks.. and I need a new host.. Part two?!

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Apparently someone at GoDaddy reads my blog, I got a call this afternoon from the ‘office of the president’ of GoDaddy and he referenced this blog posting.. that’s a trip isn’t it?

Well he was nice, but didn’t solve my problem, from what we gathered it could be a couple things, one is that there is a limit of 50 connections at one time to the database pulling data, there could be 200+ people on my site looking at it but only 50 can actually access the database…

Related to the DB, I also learned that there is no limit on the size of the database, I read somewhere a while ago that there was a 200mb limit on databases on GoDaddy shared hosting, but that limit was changed, too bad that they don’t mention this size anywhere on their site, maybe they should list that somewhere…

another problem could be the database itself, it was locking up for some reason, he recommended I optimize it… well I went into the backend of my site and deleted 4853 database entries, and then another 582 on top of that, I deleted old stuff from years ago, when you delete things in mambo it goes into the trash bin just like Windows, you have to go in and empty it just like Windows, well obviously I haven’t done that in a while, and considering you can only select 50 items at one time it took me a while…

so we’ll see if that lightened the DB any, going to do a backup shortly, and I know there is some other old entries in there that can be deleted as well…

but I think the real problem presently is the connections limitation and there is no way around that other than upgrading my hosting to a virtual dedicated server.. which is cost prohibitive right now..

hmm.. Hey GoDaddy.. Wanna be the official sponsor of DragonSteelMods?

hehe.. had to try..

Articles/Editorials

GoDaddy Sucks.. and I need a new host..

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It’s that time again for me to rant about my webhost…

This has been going on for quite some time now where my site, dragonsteelmods.com is just not there, or it displays an error page where the site cannot be displayed..

how can they offer 1 terabyte of bandwidth per month but not let you use it? most I’ve hit is like 50gigs per month..

I’ve emailed them numerous times and they keep telling me that nothing is wrong with my site, if it’s supposed to show an error page then yeah nothing is wrong with it…

they tell me that they can see it just fine, how is that possible if I can’t?

My site hit digg and I had over 1000 people online at the same time with just it slowing down, now I’ve got a little over 200 people online and it has crashed, how is that possible?

Well I guess it’s possible because I’m using GoDaddy as my host right? That’s what I get for using a shared hosting account, but then again I make no money from the site so hosting is paid out of my pocket for my sites…

I’m looking into Media Temple grid hosting now to see what they can offer me instead of GoDaddy…

I got into an argument on the phone the other day with one of the GoDaddy reps who called me to ‘thank me’, I answered the phone and he asked to speak to me and I said yes that’s me and who’s this? He says it’s so and so from GoDaddy, and I immediately cut him off and said I don’t want to buy anything, he says ‘oh no, I’m not trying to sell you something, I just called to say Thank You for being a GoDaddy customer, then in the next breath he asks me if I know that I could save money by paying for my hosting yearly, and that I’ve got a couple domains that are expiring and would I like to renew them now over the phone’

Ummm.. that sure sounds like he’s trying to get my money to me…

anyway, I’m wondering if I could actually get donations to get the hosting upgraded? I’ve seen many sites out there that have Paypal donation buttons, but I wonder if they work? I tried selling advertising but noboday want it.. I dunno, it sucks being broke..

Articles/Editorials, Rants!, SEO/Traffic

Hosting Companies, I don’t like GoDaddy anymore and shopping for a new webhost

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So Bluefur was offering a special this month for 1year of hosting for $10, I figured why not go for it, I’ve been meaning to set up another site for sometime now and I thought that would be perfect for it… it’s another techie blog, not quite finished yet though… not sure if I’m happy with it.

I found the special over at JohnChow.com his post about the special is HERE and I see there are only 63 packages left as of writing this post.

But I just wanted to say that Bluefur is really cool, especially compared to GoDaddy… obviously I transfer all the information via FTP, pictures etc to my DragonSteelMods and this account. If you have a WordPress or any website you do this as well most likely.

Transferring stuff to my new site via FTP on Bluefur was amazingly fast, I was shocked by how fast it was, the site itself is very snappy and fast also. My GoDaddy accounts are slow to do this, originally I just though it was my internet service that was slow for uploading, but as I can see now that’s not the case it’s GoDaddy that is slow.

Bluefur also has some great customer support as well, I was thinking of just migrating this blog over to them before I decided to create the new site and I had numerous questions about the migration process and other questions as well. They answered all of my questions quickly and actually answered them.

I’ve been thinking about moving DragonSteelMods for some time now to a new hosting service and I’ve been looking into many of them, emailing my questions and seeing what kind of support I can get.

Some companies haven’t even responded yet! How can you not respond to an email from a prospective new client or customer?

I had another company (media temple) who just quoted my the things that were on there website and never really answered my questions. I even went so far as to point this out to them, that they didn’t answer my questions and they just quoted me from their website, I got back a response that was yet another quote from their website…

If you can’t answer simple questions for a prospective customer then how can you expect that customer to give you their business? If that’s what I can expect from support there is no way I’ll be working with them…

Another reason I need to leave GoDaddy is that they recently migrated my website to god know where, and now it’s much slower than it was before, and I’ve noticed a drop in traffic as well since this migration occurred.

This is the reason my account was migrated:

Your hosting account, dragonsteelmods.com, is being migrated to
a new server within the next 24 hours.

So that we may continue providing the highest quality of service
to all of our customers, we are working to reduce the Java server
capacity being used by hosting accounts that are not utilizing
JSP/Servlets functionality.

I’m not by any means an expert or even a knowledgeable person when it come so to the hosting end of websites so I have no clue what that means exactly… Can anyone tell me?

but since the site has become slower that means it really is time to move on to a new webhost, and that isn’t going to be easy at all with my site. At the moment it takes about 6 hours to download for backup, my site via FTP, I’ve got some 19 thousand pages, and thousands and thousands of pictures stored there. It’s gonna be fun but I do believe that I’ll be moving to Bluefur!