Tag Archives: godaddy

After Dump GoDaddy Day

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I finally got confirmation of one domain successfully transferred over to my new registrar. One more domain to go. I’m leaving this domain with GoDaddy for now. I’ve also cancelled my hosting account and moved back to my old host, Hostmonster. They had a good deal during the holidays at $3.95 per month, so I signed up for 2 years. Of course if I cancel early, they will refund the amount for the unused time.

This is the first time I’m transferring domains. It’s easy but in my case I had paid for privacy information. If you have this, there are additional steps you have to take. It was a little headache at first but I just didn’t want to keep most of my stuff with GoDaddy.

My new registrar is Namecheap. We’ll see how they are. I’ve read mixed reviews so I’m not comfortable moving this domain to them yet.

Hostasp.net first thoughts

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I’ve been looking around for a cheap host for .NET. It’s more expensive than Linux shared hosting. I didn’t want to spend too much being that I just want to play around with it to familiarize myself with the technology – so I’m not asking for much. What I do need is a plan where I can create more than 1 MSSQL database and support .NET framework version 4.

I found Hostasp.net from http://www.microsoft.com/web/Hosting/Home. This page has a large, extensive list but little feedback. I took a chance with that company for its price and features. It’s been a day and here are my first thoughts.

The company is based out of India. There’s a huge time difference so I was concerned about contacting someone via email and getting a response in a reasonable time frame. I sent a question using their ticketing system and the response took a little over 3 hours, not bad. I also found a 15% off coupon so it even made the already low price more appealing. So I figured it was worth a try. Here are my likes and dislikes based on a 24 hour period.

LIKES:

  • The deluxe hosting plan for Windows is $48 annually. This includes unlimited databases (MSSQL and MySQL), up to 5 domains hosted, a dedicated IP address, and a free domain name.
  • The set up took under an hour. I receive emails for every update on my account during the set up.
  • It supports up to .NET framework 4 (but currently have an open ticket regarding this)
  • You can request a month trial for .99 cents. You just have to submit a ticket.
  • You can request to cancel your account and get a refund, anytime.
  • The test pages I have created seem to load quick. Although I haven’t made complex pages yet, just simple ones for testing.

DISLIKES:

  • They have a phone number you can call but it’s long distance (international). There’s many different ways to provide phone support customers in the US even though a company is based elsewhere. VOIP is the number solution. They could at least use Skype to get a US number, whether 800 or any area code, and it would still be a local call since many cell phone plans include free long distance calls to and from the US.
  • There is a way to chat with someone from their website but during the day (my time) it’s usually unavailable or away.
  • The control panel is a little weird but I’ve been using cPanel and probably expect certain things or used to how things are. This might be a bias dislike.

So far I haven’t been able to test what I need to with this host. I checked out Godaddy’s plans. With any purchase of a domain from them, you can get free hosting, supported by ads. This didn’t work since the free hosting doesn’t support .NET framework version 4. So I ended up getting the low plan just to test things.

I’ll continue to play with Hostasp.net for a few more days and see if I can get it to work. We’ll see whether I keep this host or go with Godaddy.

Switched back to Hostmonster

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I went back to Hostmonster.com for hosting. Abby wanted to start an ecommerce site and I found a need for additional features that my Godaddy account couldn’t provide. Rather than pay more with Godaddy, I went back to Hostmonster for a little more per month where they give me a near VPS environment while charging for shared hosting.

I did notice it a little slower. Not sure if it’s the WordPress reacting to the server or it’s just slower. I left for Godaddy since it’s cheaper with very little features. But now I need those extra features again. I’ve been very pleased with Hostmonster anyway I just wish it is cheaper but for the features they give and allow I shouldn’t complain much.

The transfer of the server should be complete but if you experience problems with pages let me know.

Still searching for an online storage service

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It’s been weeks since I started to look for an online storage service. I’ve looked in the past but I haven’t put much time and dedication as I have lately. I already have a RAID1+0 set up, an internal drive to handle daily backups, and a Terastation NAS box – why do I need storage online? Two reasons: 1. just in case and 2. accessibility.

I have photos that are over 10 years old. This is when digital cameras we’re hitting the consumer market. Over 90% percent of the photos I’ve taken since using a digital camera are in digital format. I don’t have them printed. These are very important to me, which is why I spend more money getting a RAID1+0 array set up on my PC, use a NAS box, and back up daily.

Having these files online, I can access them anywhere with internet connection. I’d like to be able to share files with friends and family without having to worry about file attachment size limitation with emails. Being that it’s online, files can be accessed any time. Plus, if for any reason all of my hardware at home failed, I would always have a back up of the file elsewhere.

This site along with others have been hosted with Hostmonster.com for several years. They offered unlimited storage and bandwidth. Unfortunately, all the files have to be associated with the websites somehow. I recently moved back to Godaddy for hosting. Not for the storage reason but I didn’t need the extra bells and whistles and to save a few bucks.

I still have a Flickr Pro account. It’s great. For $25 annually, I can upload an unlimited amount of photos and short videos. The problem is I don’t like the interface and I don’t like them renaming my files. Right now I’m only interested in backing up photos so this will work, as long as I ignore the 2 things I hate about the service. But what if I want to upload other files? I can’t with Flickr. So the search continues.

Amazon has been offering a full year of free AWS service (http://aws.amazon.com/free/). They give you a certain amount of resources free every month. Once you go over, they will charge you. It’s a monthly service so prices differ month to month. I have signed up and am already over the free limitations of my account. Not by much. So far after 2 weeks of uploading, I own about $1.45. Doesn’t sound much. Most of that is storage cost and bandwidth. The storage cost is competitive and reasonable, considering it’s backed up with 4 datacenters. But my usage grows and so will the monthly cost. Soon, I’ll be charged the same as if I were to get a service that supports unlimited space and bandwidth. The problem with those services is it’s for back ups only. I’d like to be able to do more than just back ups. I haven’t given up with Amazon but I’ll be watching my usage and see if it’s worth keeping.

Then I tried Godaddy’s online file folder service (http://www.godaddy.com/email/online-file-storage.aspx?ci=9022). I purchased the 100GB for $30 annually. I was able to use a 31% off coupon which brought it down to $20 for a year. Not bad for 100GB and Godaddy usually has coupons flying around. The web interface is just bloated (just like the rest of the website). I used an FTP client and the upload speed was horrible. I tried the desktop software and it was the same thing. My work has a very fast internet connection… (Speedtest.net).

speedtest

To upload a 89MB file took nearly 10 minutes! With the speed I posted above, it should be a lot less than that. I was getting between 35kbps to 140kbps. That’s close to what I get at home. No reason for it to be that slow at work. I’ve uploaded files onto my webserver with Godaddy and get very fast speeds, over 1MBps. Not sure what’s going on but I will be cancelling this service shortly.

I was considering Rackspace’s cloud storage service. Their price is the same as Amazon’s S3 ($0.15 per GB) but they do not charge for bandwidth or request fees. But they do charge $4 per month regardless of whether you use it or not. Though it comes with 10GB of storage space.

I’m going to try Flickr again since for now I only have to back up photos. Hopefully I’ll find a software that is easier to use and useful. Can’t beat their price and this is service as an offsite back up anyway. I recently switched to Adobe Lightroom 3. I will see if I can create some batch jobs that can send files to Flickr and Facebook. Problem solved, if I could.

Updating PHP 5 with Godaddy and a Dedicated server

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Jeff called me up asking for help with his dedicated server on Godaddy. He needed to update his PHP 5.1.6 to the latest stable version. His server is running Centos 5.2 (Final). He tried to call Godaddy for assistance and of course they were no help. I’m no expert myself but have played around with different systems. I found out that you can use the yum command to manage the installed packages. The problem is that the current repositories yum looks at does not contain new versions of PHP. This is why you get an error that says something like – cannot find PHP. What you need to do is add a repository that does have a newer version of PHP. We’re going to add Jason Litka‘s repository.

  • Log in to the Simple Control Panel
  • Log in using SSH
  • Type “su – ” to log in with root privileges
  • Type “nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo”. If you’re not comfortable with nano, use whatever editor you’re more comfortable with.
  • In the utterramblings.repo file type the following

    [utterramblings]
    name=Jason’s Utter Ramblings Repo
    baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/
    enabled=1
    gpgcheck=1
    gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

  • Save the file and close it
  • Now you can use “yum update php” and it should update it to the latest that the repositories have
  • Restart Apache

This tutorial is based on the one found at http://www.jasonlitka.com/yum-repository/. It took awhile for me to find the solution. I hope this helps out people who had the same problem as I did.