Signed up for my $3.99/month shared hosting plan on GoDaddy. So far the experience has been pretty good. The collection of utilities to manage your site are a bit motley, it seems as if their developers have cobbled together various scripts into a common framework. Not nearly as cohesive as CrystalTech’s control panel (very simple but still very powerful). However, GoDaddy’s relentless marketing of various add-on features kind of makes them the Wal-Mart of hosting. Not the highest end features, but with so many features available at rock-bottom prices…they serve their purpose.

I remember GoDaddy back in the day (circa NetObjects Fusion era badness) and they sent a flier promoting some site building program. One of the click a few panels in a wizard and we’ll get your business on the newfangled Internets programs. Don’t think they saw too much success with that product. I read a story about Bob Parsons where he said that he sunk most of his money from the sale of Parsons Technology into GoDaddy. He got fairly close to empty on his reserves—finally his bet on domain names really paid off. I’m glad they stayed afloat as GoDaddy brought some development jobs here to Cedar Rapids.

Since I’m running this site on BlogEngine.net, I’ll post my experience in getting the thing up and running:

• First, do not upload any files before changing permissions
• Verify in Control Panel | Settings >> ASP.NET runtime that you’re using .NET 2.0.
• Find a root directory for your blog
  • If you choose the default folder, it will already be setup
  • Else, click “Create Directory”
  • Now check “read”, “web”, “set root”
• Click “Create Sub Directory” underneath your blog folder
  • Call it “App_Data”
  • Check “Read”, “Web”, “Write”
• Open and edit your web.config file
  • Delete the line “<trust level=”High” />”
  • If you want a SQL datastore instead of XML, then follow these settings.
  • Also, go to Control Panel | Databases >> SQL Server >> Open Manager
    • Login with your DB credentials and go to “Query Analyzer”
    • Paste the contents of the setup\MSSQLSetup1.1.0.0.sql into the textbox and hit submit
• Copy all folders EXCEPT “App_Data” to your blog folder
• Open your local and remote “App_Data” folder and transfer the files (not the folder)
• Alter the blog settings as usual
  • The one tricky setting is the mail server, it needs to be “relay-hosting.secureserver.net”

Good luck, hope this helps.