Are we there yet?
Finding the right duo of blogging software and web hosting company is more difficult than finding a date in high school.
Currently, I’m hosted on godaddy.com. There was a time when godaddy was the best there was in hosting and buying domains. What started happening was things started to break. The first thing was the fopen() function in PHP. I had a script that would post a picture of the album I was listening to on my web site simply by going to amazon.com and grabbing the image. The problem is that godaddy broke fopen() by disallowing it to work outside its own domain. There were other issues as well, but this was the most frustrating.
Fast forward to this past Wednesday when I wanted to upgrade to MovableType 3.16. Turns out that godaddy broke their sbox implementation. I wrote a letter to godaddy explaining everything in detail (with 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one) and waited. The response came quickly, but unfortunately, it was a canned responsed about /usr/bin/perl (thanks, that works already) and other things that I already knew were working. Someone else on the MT support forum sent a note to godaddy and got the same canned response.
So then it became time to search for a new web host. I asked on the MacNN forums and Neowin. I tried blogging software on the Mac, all of which had their own limitations which made client-based blogging useless. I wound up hitting this brick wall where hosting companies would love to tell you what they support, but they hide what they don’t support. A perfect example is godaddy itself. Sure, they’ll tell you they support PHP, they won’t tell you that they don’t support fopen() and other functions at 100% capacity. So this makes finding a web hosting company very difficult. Even if I did find one today, who’s to say that they won’t take some functionality away tomorrow?
I love using MovableType but unfortunately I had to move away from it for the moment. WordPress is a great system so far, but I miss the features that MT has. I hope that godaddy eventually fixes the problem. I despise having to explain myself to low-level phone support weenies for 10 minutes before they finally bump me up to the Tier 2 people that can actually fix my problem.
Mike
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So what version of Movable Type previously worked with GoDaddy? I’ve wrestled for 3 days now getting MT up and running, progressively getting closer and closer until almost there – and then I think I hit the brick wall you mention above. I’ve already prepaid a years worth of hosting at GoDaddy, so I’d like to find a way to make it work. Maybe if I downgrade to an older version of MT? Could you post the documentation that you presented to GoDaddy making your case? Thanks in advance.
[b]Starman says:[/b] I think the problem is that Godaddy.com has to fix their site. They were very unhelpful in helping me with the problem, and threatened to charge me for looking at it. That’s why I moved to viziweb.