Tag Archives: godaddy

I am looking for cheap, shared web hosting because the downtime and customer support I’m getting with JustHost is intollerable (and well documented). I’m willing to pay about $10/month for hosting, and I don’t ask for much other than reasonable uptime. I have a blog (ardamis.com) that gets about 1000 visits per day, a few other sites that barely get any traffic, and a small photo gallery that I share only with family and friends. I don’t stream or make available for download any video or audio files, but I do want to be able to upload all of my personal photos and use my web host as an off-site backup. I have an account with Drop Box, but I have gigs of photos, so I would have to purchase extra storage, and I kinda want to keep the Drop Box stuff separate. I’ve also considered using Google Drive, but I have enough photos that I would need to purchase additional space.

I’m currently paying $108/year for hosting and an additional $19.99/year for a dedicated IP address. I’m willing to pay a little more, but not terribly much more.

Before JustHost, I was a GoDaddy customer for something like 5 years, and there was almost no downtime. Customer service was incredibly, suprisingly good and the reps were always knowlegeable and effective. I left because I didn’t like the proprietary admin panel that GoDaddy has developed and wanted to keep my domain registrar and my web host at separate companies. But really, there was nothing wrong with GoDaddy’s hosting at the time, that I could tell.

The problem with researching new web hosts is that unbiased information (if it’s out there) is buried under tons of completely untrustworthy garbage sites that sell reviews and rankings. If you look for personal recommendations based on experiences with multiple hosts, it is extremely hard to tell from the obscure bulletin board threads whether the posts come from shills or actual customers. Even if one finds posts that appear to be from genuine customers, their descriptions of their experiences are usually subjective, anecdotal, and not comparative.

(As a little aside, BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster, and JustHost are all owned by the same corporate parent, Endurance International Group. An outage affecting one can affect them all, as described in the Mashable article: Bluehost, HostGator and HostMonster Go Down. So, take these things into consideration if you are trying to choose between them.)

This post, then, is just my notes on what I’ve found while researching my next web host.

No Host

One option would be to not go with a hosting company at all and just use Amazon EC2 to self-host my blog. I have seriously considered doing this, but by some accounts, it’s actually more expensive to run an EC2 instance than purchase shared hosting. And I don’t really want to become my own linux administrator. As much as I enjoy occasionally tinkering with Ubuntu, I just want my sites to run smoothly and for someone to keep the server up-to-date and to fix problems for me quickly if something breaks.

Bluehost

http://www.bluehost.com/

Everyone has heard of Bluehost. They’re huge. Their tagline is “Trusted by Millions as the Best Web Hosting Solution”. So there you have it. Maybe you want to be one of their millions of customers.

According to the builtwith.com profile for ardamis.com, the site’s hosting provider is not JustHost but BlueHost!

Their website has terribly low production values, for being such a huge company. They have a crappy stock photograph of a dude with a headset providing customer support, below the text “We specialize in customer service. Call or Chat!” I do not want to live chat with this dude, or anyone else. I probably don’t need any customer service from my hosting company unless they screw something up, so prominently featuring your support phone numbers make me wonder if they get tons of calls.

They do have cPanel, which is nice, as I am wary of proprietary admin panels after using GoDaddy for years.

They also offer unlimited domains, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwith, unlimited email accounts, and a free domain. They also offer custom php.ini files and SSH access. And they do all of this for just $6.95/month for 1 year.

It actually sounds pretty decent, on paper. But one does get the sense that they are completely driven by the bottom-line, and that your site is going to be jammed into an already crowded server.

HostGator

http://www.hostgator.com/

HostGator is the other huge discount web hosting company, competing with BlueHost and GoDaddy for what I picture to be the same sort of confused customers or WordPress blog/Google Adsense scammers.

Like with BlueHost, I’m immediately turned off by the website, which is just ugly as all get out and also conspicuously promotes Live Chat support with a stock photograph of a girl with a (wired) headset. The pricing for the hosting plans is also a bit misleading, as all of the pricing shown is discounted 20%, which discount is only valid for the first invoice.

Another thing I really dislike is that there are three tiers of shared hosting, named “Hatchling Plan”, “Baby Plan”, and “Business Plan”. I just can’t see myself signing up for the ridiculously named “Hatchling Plan” or “Baby Plan”. Which is probably by design so that people like me upgrade to the more respectable and grown-up sounding “Business Plan”.

They do offer a single free website transfer for shared hosting, whether or not the site being transferred uses cPanel.

Lithium Hosting

http://www.lithiumhosting.com/

I first heard about Lithium Hosting while reading the ars technica article How to set up a safe and secure Web server, which also mentioned A Small Orange.

Their site looks pretty good, but it’s a little bit too template-like, and I felt that a quick glance on themeforest.net would turn up about a dozen hosting reseller templates for which the layout and stock placeholder text is an almost exact match. For example, the tagline on their home page is “Why we’re not the best host in the world.” Yeah, that sort of false modesty smells just a bit too contrived here. I was almost ready to sign up with Lithium Hosting, but the cookie-cutter stuff gave me enough pause to keep looking.

One of the things that I didn’t like is that they offer a free month coupon code, but it doesn’t work when you configure your cart to pay a year-at-a-time. Another thing I didn’t like was the $36/year cost of a dedicated IP address – $5 to set up and then $3 per month thereafter. It seems like the price on dedicated IP addresses has dramatically increased in the months since all the breathless news reports about the world running out of IPv4 addresses. They also charge an extra $60/year for shell access via SSH. That’s pretty shameful.

Bailing out of the cart just before purchase doesn’t cause a window to pop up an lure you back with a discount, as I fully expected to happen.

I checked out their Facebook page and the most recent post was from a guy who’s website was down. Two other recent posts were about downtime.

At the end of the day, Lithium Hosting just seems too much like a hosting reseller itself than a company that will be around for years.

A Small Orange

http://asmallorange.com/

I first heard about A Small Orange while reading the same ars technica article How to set up a safe and secure Web server that mentioned Lithium Hosting.

My first impression of the site was that it looked pretty much exactly as I wanted my hosting company to look. Again, I’m being pretty superficial here, but I want to be happy with my choice and if the company’s outward appearance is cruddy then I’m not going to be as satisfied. I want to be certain that I made the best choice, and a crappy, thrown-together-looking site injects a small amount of doubt. The site clearly sets out the costs of the different hosting plans, and I knew I would be looking at shared hosting first. There are five tiers of shared hosting, the least expensive being $35/year for 250 MB storage and 5 GB bandwidth. Basically, the only differentiating factor between the different levels of shared hosting is the amount storage and bandwidth. The standard features for all shared hosting accounts include:

  • Unlimited Parked and Addon Domains
  • Unlimited Subdomains
  • Unlimited POP3/IMAP Mail Accounts
  • Unlimited MySQL Databases
  • Unlimited FTP Accounts
  • Automated Daily Backups
  • cPanel
  • Automatic Script Installation (Softaculous)
  • Jailed shell upon request
  • FTP and SFTP access
  • Cron jobs for scheduled tasks
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee

A Small Orange uses CloudLinux as the server OS.

OK, yes, there is still a Live Chat button, but it’s this inconspicuous little green tab at the left side of the window that states “live help”. That’s it.

I checked out their Facebook page for recent posts, and they were almost entirely positive, with a good amount of interaction from the admin. The page claims that the company is home to 45,000 web sites, which might be exactly what I’m looking for, without even knowing it.

One of the things that ultimately convinced me to go with them was the Inc.com write up of CEO Douglas Hanna in America’s coolest College Start-Ups 2012 and the Duke Chronical article Hanna makes juicy profits with A Small Orange. Hanna worked at HostGator for two years in customer service, so one could reasonably expect that he knows what customers want in affordable hosting.

I have also found a ton of coupon codes for A Small Orange (just Google it) for either $5 or 15% off your order.

saveme$5
saveme15%
save_$5
save_15%

While setting up a new MySQL account at a GoDaddy hosted web site, I kept getting an error when logging in to phpMyAdmin.

Error
#1045 – Access denied for user

For things like database usernames/passwords and other things that I’ll never have to remember or type, I like to use a long string of random characters. One excellent source of such strings is GRC’s Ultra High Security Password Generator. I typically use a subset of the 63 random alpha-numeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) in the bottom box. This gives me a good mix of uppercase, lowercase, and numbers, which satisfies the requirements of most password systems that require even minimum complexity.

So, I picked a string of characters for the database name and a different string for the password (making sure the password contained at least 1 uppercase character and 1 number), pasted them into the config.php file I was going to use on the project and then pasted them into the database setup form and created my database. No problem.

I gave it 10 or 15 minutes to get all set up and then launched phpMyAdmin. I copied and pasted the username and password from my config file into the log in fields and wham, I got the #1045.

After much second guessing and more copying and pasting, all with no luck, I tried resetting the password back in the Hosting Control Center. I waited a few more minutes for good measure and tried again. Still, #1045 – Access denied for user.

Then it was time to Google, which turned up a thread full of people with the same experience at http://community.godaddy.com/groups/web-hosting/forum/topic/mysql-login-error-1045-access-denied-for-user/?sid&sp=1&topic_page=1&num=15.

Back in the Control Center, I noticed that the mixed case characters I’d used for the database/username had been converted to lowercase. So I tried using the lowercase version at phpMyAdmin and still no luck.

I submitted a support ticket, as recommended in the thread, and then called Customer Support for good measure.

The guy confirmed that the database was in good shape and that the last password reset took effect, then had me reset it again. And of course, when I tried to log into phpMyAdmin a moment later with the lowercase username, it went right in.

The fix (or a plausible explanation, at least)

The lesson learned here, is that even though the new MySQL database setup form will accept mixed case characters as the database name/username, it will silently convert them to lowercase on you. The phpMyAdmin login, then, is case sensitive, so you may want to copy and paste from the Control Center into phpMyAdmin to be sure you’re feeding it the correct username.

As a follow-up to my post on compressing .php, .css and .js files without mod_gzip or mod_deflate, I’m documenting the changes I made to the .htaccess file on ardamis.com in order to speed up page load times for returning visitors and satisfy the Leverage browser caching recommendation of Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug Add-on.

A great explanation of why browser caching helps the web deliver a better user experience is at betterexplained.com.

Two authoritative articles on the subject are Google’s Performance Best Practices | Optimize caching and Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site | Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header.

I’d like to point out that in researching browser cashing, I came across a lot of information that contradicted the rather clear instructions from Google:

It is important to specify one of Expires or Cache-Control max-age, and one of Last-Modified or ETag, for all cacheable resources. It is redundant to specify both Expires and Cache-Control: max-age, or to specify both Last-Modified and ETag.

I’m not sure that this recommendation is entirely correct, as the W3C states that Expires and Cache-Control max-age are used in different situations, with Cache-Control max-age overriding Expires in the event of conflicts.

If a response includes both an Expires header and a max-age directive, the max-age directive overrides the Expires header, even if the Expires header is more restrictive. This rule allows an origin server to provide, for a given response, a longer expiration time to an HTTP/1.1 (or later) cache than to an HTTP/1.0 cache.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

It would seem that Cache-Control is the preferred method of controlling browser caching going forward.

HTTP 1.1 clients will honour “Cache-Control” (which is easier to use and much more flexible).
HTTP 1.0 clients will ignore “Cache-Control” but honour “Expires”. With “Expires” you get thus at least a bit control for these old clients.

http://www.peterbe.com/plog/cache-control_or_expires

In any event, Page Speed won’t protest if you do end up sending both Expires and Cache-Control max-age, or if you remove both Last-Modified and ETag, but I was able to get the best results with just setting Cache-Control max-age and removing the ETag.

Setting the headers in .htaccess

On Apache, configuring the proper headers can be done in the .htaccess file, using the Header directive. The Header directive requires the mod_headers module to be enabled.

I’m choosing to set a far future Expires header of one year on my images files, because I tweak the CSS and JavaScript pretty often, and don’t want those file types to be cached as long.

Add the following code to your .htaccess file to set your Cache-Control and Expires headers, adjusting the date to be one year from today.

# Set Cache-Control and Expires headers
<filesMatch "\\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|mp3|mp4)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, private"
Header set Expires "Sun, 17 July 2011 20:00:00 GMT"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\\.(css|css.gz)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, private"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\\.(js|js.gz)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, private"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\\.(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=216000, private, must-revalidate"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\\.(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=7200, private, must-revalidate"
</filesMatch>

Removing ETags in .htaccess

Most sources recommend simply removing ETags if they are not required.

Entity tags (ETags) are a mechanism that web servers and browsers use to determine whether the component in the browser’s cache matches the one on the origin server.
…
If you’re not taking advantage of the flexible validation model that ETags provide, it’s better to just remove the ETag altogether.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#etags

Add the following code to your .htaccess file to remove ETag headers.

# Turn off ETags
FileETag None
Header unset ETag

Set Expires headers with ExpiresByType (optional)

If your host has the mod_expires module enabled, you can specify Expires headers by file type. Godaddy does not have this module enabled.

# Set Expires headers
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 second"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 604800 seconds"

Removing the Last-Modified header in .htaccess (optional)

I’m following Google’s instructions and not removing the Last-Modified header, but if you wanted to do so, you could use:

# Remove Last-Modified header
Header unset Last-Modified

Busting the cache when files change

What happens when you change files and need to force browsers to load the new files? Christian Johansen offers two methods in his post on Using a far future expires header.

File compression is possible on Apache web hosts that do not have mod_gzip or mod_deflate enabled, and it’s easier than you might think.

A great explanation of why compression helps the web deliver a better user experience is at betterexplained.com.

Two authoritative articles on the subject are Google’s Performance Best Practices documentation | Enable compression and Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site | Gzip Components.

Compressing PHP files

If your Apache server does not have mod_gzip or mod_deflate enabled (Godaddy and JustHost shared hosting, for example), you can use PHP to compress pages on-the-fly. This is still preferable to sending uncompressed files to the browser, so don’t worry about the additional work the server has to do to compress the files at each request.

Option 1: PHP.INI using zlib.output_compression

The zlib extension can be used to transparently compress PHP pages on-the-fly if the browser sends an “Accept-Encoding: gzip” or “deflate” header. Compression with zlib.output_compression seems to be disabled on most hosts by default, but can be enabled with a custom php.ini file:

[PHP]

zlib.output_compression = On

Credit: http://php.net/manual/en/zlib.configuration.php

Check with your host for instructions on how to implement this, and whether you need a php.ini file in each directory.

Option 2: PHP using ob_gzhandler

If your host does not allow custom php.ini files, you can add the following line of code to the top of your PHP pages, above the DOCTYPE declaration or first line of output:

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>

Credit: GoDaddy.com

For WordPress sites, this code would be added to the top of the theme’s header.php file.

According to php.net, using zlib.output_compression is preferred over ob_gzhandler().

For WordPress or other CMS sites, an advantage of zlib.output_compression over the ob_gzhandler method is that all of the .php pages served will be compressed, not just those that contain the global include (eg.: header.php, etc.).

Running both ob_gzhandler and zlib.output_compression at the same time will throw a warning, similar to:

Warning: ob_start() [ref.outcontrol]: output handler ‘ob_gzhandler’ conflicts with ‘zlib output compression’ in /home/path/public_html/ardamis.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/header.php on line 7

Compressing CSS and JavaScript files

Because the on-the-fly methods above only work for PHP pages, you’ll need something else to compress CSS and JavaScript files. Furthermore, these files typically don’t change, so there isn’t a need to compress them at each request. A better method is to serve pre-compressed versions of these files. I’ll describe a few different ways to do this, but in both cases, you’ll need to add some lines to your .htaccess file to send user agents the gzipped versions if they support the encoding. This requires that Apache’s mod_rewrite be enabled (and I think it’s almost universally enabled).

Option 1: Compress locally and upload

CSS and JavaScript files can be gzipped on the workstation, then uploaded along with the uncompressed files. Use a utility like 7-Zip (quite possibly the best compression software around, and it’s free) to compress the CSS and JavaScript files using the gzip format (with extension *.gz), then upload them to your server.

For Windows users, here is a handy command to compress all the .css and .js files in the current directory and all sub directories (adjust the path to the 7-Zip executable, 7z.exe, as necessary):

for /R %i in (*.css *.js) do "C:\Program Files (x86)\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tgzip "%i.gz" "%i" -mx9

Note that the above command is to be run from the command line. The batch file equivalent would be:

for /R %%i in (*.css *.js) do "C:\Program Files (x86)\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tgzip "%%i.gz" "%%i" -mx9

Option 2: Compress on the server

If you have shell access, you can run a command to create a gzip copy of each CSS and JavaScript file on your site (or, if you are developing on Linux, you can run it locally):

find . -regex ".*\(css\|js\)$" -exec bash -c 'echo Compressing "{}" && gzip -c --best "{}" > "{}.gz"' \;

This may be a bit too technical for many people, but is also much more convenient. It is particularly useful when you need to compress a large number of files (as in the case of a WordPress installation with multiple plugins). Remember to run it every time you automatically update WordPress, your theme, or any plugins, so as to replace the gzip’d versions of any updated CSS and JavaScript files.

The .htaccess (for both options)

Add the following lines to your .htaccess file to identify the user agents that can accept the gzip encoded versions of these files.

<files *.js.gz>
  AddType "text/javascript" .gz
  AddEncoding gzip .gz
</files>
<files *.css.gz>
  AddType "text/css" .gz
  AddEncoding gzip .gz
</files>
RewriteEngine on
#Check to see if browser can accept gzip files.
ReWriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Safari
#make sure there's no trailing .gz on the url
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.+\.gz$
#check to see if a .gz version of the file exists.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
#All conditions met so add .gz to URL filename (invisibly)
RewriteRule ^(.+) $1.gz [QSA,L]

Credit: opensourcetutor.com

I’m not sure it’s still necessary to exclude Safari.

For added benefit, minify the CSS and JavaScript files before gzipping them. Google’s excellent Page Speed Firefox/Firebug Add-on makes this very easy. Yahoo’s YUI Compressor is also quite good.

Verify that your content is being compressed

Use the nifty Web Page Content Compression Verification tool at http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/ to confirm that your server is sending the compressed files.

Speed up page load times for returning visitors

Compression is only part of the story. In order to further speed page load times for your returning visitors, you will want to send the correct headers to leverage browser caching.

These Godaddy promotion / coupon codes were confirmed valid as of June 30, 2006. Godaddy expires promotional codes pretty regularly, so it pays to just search for codes when you need them and then try a bunch to find the best discount.

There is a great list of GoDaddy coupon codes at Fat Wallet that is more up-to-date than this one, but even then, some are expired or invalid.

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