And Grid Hosting costs the same as Shared!

Here’s a description from GoDaddy:

“Grid Hosting is a flexible hosting platform that matches performance with demand. If your site’s traffic spikes, Grid Hosting responds by allocating more resources and keeping your site live. If your site starts small, but is growing, Grid Hosting grows with it so you don’t have to manually upgrade and experience any unnecessary downtime.

Grid Hosting “pools” the resources of many servers and your site’s content resides on multiple servers. This networked system helps achieve a high reliability—beyond 99.9%—for your website because if one server shuts down, only a fraction of the grid’s resources are lost.

Grid Hosting has resources in reserve which are always available to allocate when necessary.”

There are drawbacks however… some people are reporting some bugs (like error messages that don’t make sense when configuring the accounts, setting up domains, etc.) but just as many others are reporting that the bugs are squashed quickly. Essentially once your site is running it’s generally fine.. it’s just that some features behave differently.. but give it time, it is still relatively new.

An example of an issue that I came across…. When installing some software like Prosper202 for example… you might have had to change references of “DOCUMENT_ROOT” in the code to “SUBDOMAIN_DOCUMENT_ROOT” to work with GoDaddy shared hosting… but you don’t have to (or at least I didn’t) when using the grid hosting.. so.. if you are migrating from shared to grid and have a working copy of Prosper202 be sure to check it right away as you might have to switch back from “SUBDOMAIN_DOCUMENT_ROOT” to “DOCUMENT_ROOT” in the code. (Or I can do it as part of my Prosper202 install service if you like.)

Other consideration when doing the no-cost “upgrade” to grid…

• Access databases are not supported (but you have MySQL and MS SQL)
• Front Page Server Extensions are not currently supported
• Java and ColdFusion are not currently supported
• .. and other nerdy programmy tech stuff… read about the limitations before purchasing…

Despite the above limitations, standard stuff will be OK… running some WordPress sites, static sites.. etc.

In an effort to promote Grid/Cloud Hosting GoDaddy is offering some discounts, check out the current GoDaddy hosting deals HERE.

More info: GoDaddy Cloud Hosting (Or Grid Hosting)

“MyBrand lets you use your own domain name to host your feed. It puts you in even greater control of your content and its identity.”

Follow the steps below to map your feed from FeedBurner to your own domain in your GoDaddy hosting account.

First, login to your FeedBurner account using your Google or Gmail account. Then burn your feed if it isn’t already burned. To do that, simply paste your feed address into the text box, then click ‘Next’. Make note of the ‘feed address’, which is the portion after the http://feeds.feedburner.com/ part because we will need that later. Click ‘Next’ again.

Setup MyBrand

1. Click on the ‘My Account’ link (top right).
2. Click ‘MyBrand’ from the left menu.
3. In a new window or tab, login to your GoDaddy account.
4. Click ‘Domain Manager’ from the left side.
5. Click your domain name from the list of domains.
6. Scroll down a bit and in the center you should see a link that says ‘Total DNS Control’. Click that link.
7. Click the ‘Add New CNAME Record’ button (right side below the A records).
8. Enter an alias name. For example, I use ‘feeds’.
9. In step 1 on the MyBrand page you will see the value for host name. Mine is: ’8eeuzs.feedproxy.ghs.google.com’. Yours may be the same or similar.
10. Click ‘OK’, then ‘OK’ again.
11. In step 2 on the MyBrand page enter the subdomain that you just created. In my case it would be ‘feeds.domain.com’. Of course, domain.com would be replaced with my actual domain name.
12. Your new burned/mapped address will now be: http://alias-name.domain.com/feed-burner-feed-address

More info: How To Map Your Feedburner Feed To Your Own Domain On GoDaddy

I just setup WordPress MU with sub domains in my shared hosting account on GoDaddy and it wasn’t as straight forward as I would’ve hoped… so now that I got it down to a science I figured I’d write out a quick tutorial in case someone else is attempting to do the same thing.

OK, WordPress MU isn’t what it used to be, it’s no longer a stand alone product, it comes packaged (albeit hidden by default) starting with WordPress 3.0. It might also be called a WordPress Network or WordPress Multisite. Essentially it allows you to run multiple blogs under one domain. There are a ton of reasons why you might want to do that, limited to your imagination.

The straight forward steps to follow to setup MU on most hosts can be found here. However, GoDaddy of course is another animal.

GoDaddy offers a brief tutorial for enabling WordPress 3.0 Multisites here, which may be helpful if you want to setup your WP network using sub-directories. This is the part that I didn’t like…

I personally don’t like the idea of using sub-directories to install new blogs to because then you are limited on what you can name your posts on your main (root) blog when you are using /%postname%/ for permalinks, among other things… so I was bound and determined to get this working with sub-domains and I finally did.

Note: For these instructions I started from a fresh install of WordPress 3.1. Also, I am using the GoDaddy Deluxe Shared Hosting package on Linux, which offers unlimited domains attached to your account and unlimited bandwidth…

…although at the moment the Ultimate Plan is almost half off making it very close to the same price. The Ultimate Plan allows unlimited storage and databases as well, plus it includes an SSL certificate.

These instructions will work for both of the above mentioned packages.

Also worth mentioning… this work around might only be feasible if the admin (or assistant) will personally be adding the new blogs to the network. If you plan to allow auto-creation of accounts and blogs (like is done at WordPress.com) this method may not be ideal.

Setup WordPress Multisite on GoDaddy

1. Be sure you have the latest version of WP installed in the root of your domain (not in a subfolder or subdomain)
2. Edit the wp-config.php file and just above the line that reads:
   /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
   add this line:
   define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);
3. We won’t be installing wildcard subdomains so you can ignore any warnings that you may get.
4. Login or re-login to the WP Admin and under Tools, click Network. Fill in all the info (be sure to choose subdomains), and click Install.
5. Follow the instructions for creating the blogs.dir directory under /wp-content/, and pasting in the code for .htaccess and wp-config.php. Permissions should be setup properly by default so don’t worry about that.
6. Remove the following line of code from wp-config.php that you created earlier:
   define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);
7. Now after re-logging into WP you should see a “Super Admin” panel to allow to add/edit sites in your network.
8. Here’s the kicker. For every site that you create you have to manually add a subdomain in the GoDaddy Control Panel. Had wildcard subdomains worked on GoDaddy this extra step wouldn’t be necessary. Read below for the steps.

Adding Subdomains on GoDaddy

1. Login to GoDaddy.
2. From the left side click Hosting, then click the green “Launch” button.
3. Go to Settings, then Domain Management.
4. Under Subdomains next to your domain click “Add” or “Manage”.
5. Name your subdomain exactly the same as you named it in WP.

Choose the option to “Create or select a folder” and type in the path to your site.

If the site you are working with is an add-on domain and you followed my steps for setting up multiple sites in your GoDaddy account then the path would be:

/_sites/domain.com/

And if the domain is not an add-on domain (i.e. it is the main domain attached to your hosting account), then just leave the / in there.

Semi-technical note: Now what happens is… when someone visits the subdomain it redirects back to your main site… and the rules that you pasted in .htaccess earlier will forward the user to the proper site in the network. Basically after GoDaddy shoves them off to the main WP install.. WP handles the rest.

MU-Plugins

On the same level as the “plugins” folder you can create a folder called “mu-plugins” if you like. It stands for “must use”. Basically, any plugin in there will already be ready to go for the new sites. However, not all plugins work with MU, so you should read the readme.txt file that comes with plugin to be sure. Some plugins have to have files in different spots in order to work.

I haven’t played around much with the mu-plugins but I did find a couple that I like so far.

There’s a cool plugin that allows you setup defaults for each new site added to the network. It’s called “New Blog Defaults”. You can download it here.

Akismet is another good one to throw in there. You can hard-code the API Key in the akismet.php file. Then upload the folder to the mu-plugins folder. Then drag the akismet.php out of it’s folder into mu-plugins.

That’s it for now… I’ll post more as I play around with my WordPress network more. Hope this post has been helpful for you.

More info: Setting Up WordPress MU (Multisite) with Subdomains on GoDaddy Shared Hosting

You’ll likely run across some errors when trying to install or upgrade Prosper202 on your GoDaddy hosting… so here’s how to get it going..

First, keep in mind that it needs to be installed on a linux server using a dedicated domain or subdomain (not a subfolder). If you haven’t setup a subdomain or aren’t using a dedicated domain, do that first. Also, it needs php5. I wrote a post about how to quickly and easily upgrade to php5 on GoDaddy here. For a small fee I can get everything setup for you…contact me here.

Now.. to fix the other errors, it’s as simple as changing the references of “DOCUMENT_ROOT” in the install files to “SUBDOMAIN_DOCUMENT_ROOT”. The problem is that there are so many of them.. but it actually isn’t too bad when following the steps below and using an advanced text editor.

I adopted the steps below from a forum post that I found on Prosper202 here. Those instructions use Notepad++ for searching/editing/saving multiple text files while the ones below use TextPad.

1. Download/Install TextPad.
2. Download Prosper202 and unzip it into a new folder on your desktop.
3. Open the folder and right click “index.php” and click “TextPad” to open it in TextPad.
4. Click on the “Search” menu and click “Find In Files…” or press Ctrl+F5.
5. In the “Find what:” box type: DOCUMENT_ROOT
6. You can probably leave the “In folder:” selection as the default but I would browse to the folder you created and unzipped Prosper202 to just in case you have other files in the default location that you DON’T want changed.
7. Click “Find”.
8. A “Search Results” box will pop up listing every file that contains your search query… click inside the box, press Ctrl+A to “select all” and then right click and click “Open All”.
9. After you open them all, close the “Search Results” and “Find In Files” boxes.
10. Click the “Search” menu and click “Replace…” or press F8.
11. The “Find what:” box should already be pre-populated with: DOCUMENT_ROOT (if not, add it)
12. In the “Replace with:” box type: SUBDOMAIN_DOCUMENT_ROOT
13. Under “Scope:” choose “All documents”.
14. Click “Replace All” and click “OK” to edit all of the files. Now close the “Replace” box.
15. Click the “File” menu and click “Save All” or press Ctrl+Shift+S.
16. Close TextPad and upload the files to your server, replacing the existing files if necessary.

Hope it works for you! Any questions go ahead and post below…

More info: Steps For Installing Or Upgrading Prosper202 on GoDaddy

The steps below are only necessary if you are hosted with GoDaddy AND you don’t already have php5 running. (It may work with other hosts but I can’t say for sure.)

To test your version of php you can run the phpinfo() command. Learn more here: http://www.web-scripts.biz/phptest.htm

If you have WordPress installed there will have been a file automatically created (providing the permissions were set properly, which they will be for GoDaddy users) called .htaccess in the root of your blog installation on the server. You may also create one with a text editor. Note that there is no actual file name for this file, just an extension. Download that file (using FTP software) to your desktop (or open it for editing in the Control Panel if you prefer). If you chose to download it, open it with a decent text editor (like TextPad, because Notepad may jumble it up) and at the very top of the file add this line: AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php

Then save the file and re-upload. Your GoDaddy account should now be using php5.

More info: Instructions To Quickly Self-Upgrade To php5 For GoDaddy Users

Simple Templates

It seems they took their cues from phpBay when creating the plugin. There are several similarities. I really like the template features of phpOStock to let you change the layout/look of the listings. phpBay allows you to change the layout of the listings as well but offers some global settings to affect the layout in the plugin settings page, which I found confused things a bit.

If you know a bit of HTML you can quickly and easily edit (or create) a new layout for the listings (on both phpBay and phpOStock). I think there should be a dropdown list of available layouts to pick from for both plugins. phpOStock should have that functionality already but doesn’t appear to. phpOstock cleverly lets you specify different templates to use on a per-post or per-page level if you wish.

You know…it would be nice if the default templates for both plugins would make the images hyperlinked as well, but for some reason they don’t.

I also like how phpOStock lets you specify ahead of time which parameters you plan to use in your templates, that way, only the data you want is pulled in and there is no wasted bandwidth. Like phpBay, phpOStock also implements SEO URL’s which is nice, but they didn’t do the same for images.

The Oddball (But Great) Server, GoDaddy

Another great feature that may go under-appreciated… they let you specify whether you are on a GoDaddy server or not. Because, as a lot of people that host with GoDaddy probably became aware of quickly, GoDaddy behaves differently than other servers and there is often tweaks that need to be done to get apps and even some WP themes to work. Albeit minor tweaks, but for those that don’t know what they are doing, there may be some frustration and some people have actually switched hosting companies for that reason. Well, phpOStock takes care of the tweaks that need to be made. I would think that they should be able to detect whether you are on a GoDaddy server and make the changes silently but I’m not a programmer so I may be wrong.

It’d be nice if other software/theme developers followed suit as far as GoDaddy settings. It would save a lot of support frustrations for the developers and headaches for the users. For example, the self-hosted version of Tracking202 needs over 100 changes made when installing on GoDaddy and also for every upgrade!

Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: simplexmlelement

If I had paid closer attention to the READ-ME file and manual I would have noticed that I needed to have php5 on my server. Well, I tried to run phpOStock on php4 and I got some grief with the fatal error mentioned above. If you host with GoDaddy, add the following line: AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php to the top of your .htaccess file and you will be upgraded to php5 and that fatal error regarding simplexmlelement should vanish.

Get phpOStock

So, although I have never actually heard of Overstock.com nor phpOStock until sometime last month, I can see how some decent money can be made with them, being that it is sort of the same concept as phpBay. Overstock.com runs their affiliate program through CJ.com (no longer with LinkShare) and pays their affiliates 7% of all sales.

I rate phpOStock a 4.9 out of 5 and although I haven’t made any money from it yet, I suspect I will very soon, and I do recommend it. I will keep you updated with my experiences with it.

Let me know if you have ever heard of/used phpOStock and your experiences with it in the comments below…

Click Here To Learn More About phpOStock

More info: phpOStock – A Simple Powerful WP Plugin

A lot of companies offer some low monthly prices but the fine print is.. you must pay 12, 24 or 36 months in advance. But still you can often get hosting for just over $100 for a couple of years. I priced out some of the various “unlimited” plans out there. They offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited MySQL databases and unlimited domains. That’s right, you can host all your web sites with just one hosting account.

Also, I priced out some the hosting packages with the cheapest monthly fees. They don’t always offer you the unlimited perks and you often have to pay a few years up front. Personally, I’d go with unlimited and not bother with the cheapies….

Dot5 and JustHost seem to have the cheapest for the unlimited plans. Dot5′s unlimited plan also seems to be their cheapest plan overall..so that might be the way to go if you are on a budget. I’ve only ever used GoDaddy and LunarPages myself. They both have been great.

Cost Effective Unlimited Hosting Plans – unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited MySQL databases and unlimited domains

More info: Should A New Affiliate Get Dedicated Hosting?

Normally SK works fine on GoDaddy as long as you upload the sk-article file in binary mode. But if you get an error saying that Zend Optimizer isn’t installed it’s like because you are using php version 5.

I ran into this problem tonight. Although I have other sites that use Syndicate Kahuna within the same hosting package and they work fine, for one of my sites it didn’t and the only real difference is that I enabled php 5 for that particular site. In case you didn’t know, to enable php5 on GoDaddy you just have to add this line to the top of your .htaccess file: AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php

Here’s how I fixed it to get SK working…

1) Create a free account at Zend.com
2) Download Zend Optimizer for Linux x86 (32 Bit)
3) Unzip the Zend package and find the file: /data/5_2_x_comp/ZendOptimizer.so
4) Upload that file to your blog to a folder called “zend”
5) Create a file called php5.ini with the following text…

[Zend]
zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15
zend_extension=zend/ZendOptimizer.so
zend_extension_ts=zend/TS/ZendOptimizer.so

6) Upload the php5.ini file to the root

That should do it.

More info: Zend Optimizer Error for Syndicate Kahuna on GoDaddy

EDIT (July 23,2009): Among web professionals who have been in the business a long time, the general consensus is that GoDaddy is the best place to register domains. The domains propagate very quickly and are usually ready to go within minutes after purchase, compared to hours at other registrars. However, there are a lot mixed reviews about GoDaddy hosting. I personally am still happy with my shared hosting account at GoDaddy, but I do have hosting accounts at other companies now as well. For reasons I won’t get into in this post, it is sometimes handy to have multiple hosting accounts as your business grows and you reveal new strategies. Also, there has been some new competition in hosting, offering some more affordable prices. Check out this post to see a list of unlimited hosting companies and the prices: Should A New Affiliate Get Dedicate Hosting? END OF EDIT

The features with the GoDaddy deluxe plan are great. You can host unlimited web sites with just one account. I literally have dozens of web sites but only one hosting account that costs me less than $80 USD per year.

With the hosting package you get plenty of storage space, plenty of data transfer, plenty of email accounts and as mentioned, unlimited web sites.

You also get 25 MySQL databases (which is the database engine used for WordPress blogs for example). I personally only use up a few of them, yet I use a database on practically every single web site that I manage. That’s because most of my sites are really WordPress blogs and with WordPress you are able to easily use the same database for multiple installations.

One thing though is that only your hosted domain has access to the, I think it’s 500, email accounts that they give you. But the extra domains that you purchase to setup your other web sites are given an email address and 100 email forwards. I have never needed anymore than that, but if you do, GoDaddy gives the option to buy extra email addresses.

Facebook, Microsoft adCenter and Google Adwords Credits

Currently offered with a 12-month deluxe plan is $25 worth of Google AdWords credits, $50 worth of MSN adCenter credits and now $50 worth of Facebook credits to do PPC advertising. The AdWords credits are for new customers only. And make sure you claim the credits quickly otherwise they’ll snatch them back. I think you get a week but I’m not positive. You don’t have to use them immediately, you just have to claim them. I don’t know the rules with MSN adCenter but I do know that the offer is good for only US residents.

So…if you are able to take advantage of all 3 PPC credits you are really getting paid to buy hosting for the first year and plus you can scoop up a domain name at the same time for $1.99. I believe all non-domain related purchases grant you a $1.99 domain. Not bad.

To get you started, here are the steps to get a hosting account and domain name at GoDaddy:

• Go to the GoDaddy hosting page (link will open in new window).
• Scroll down a bit and click the orange “Add” button in the center under the “Deluxe Plan” section.
• To take advantage of the $1.99 domain name offer, enter in the domain name you are interested in in the box at the top right.

At this point your hosting package/domain should be in the shopping cart. You can change the domain registration to just 1 year if you like. So…if you choose the 12 month deluxe hosting package and 1 year for a .com domain name, your shopping cart total should be $81.85. (price verified on July 23, 2009) Not too shabby for being able to host unlimited web sites and getting a domain name for one year.

Now go ahead and put checkmarks in the boxes if you accept the terms and the agreement and checkout.

Setup your hosting account with unlimited web sites now.

More info: Host Unlimited Web Sites With GoDaddy Deluxe Plan, Plus Get $125 In Ad Credits