This is why you will NEVER find Godaddy on my cheap hosting list.

Unfortunately, I chose to use GoDaddy as a hosting provider for a ColdFusion site that I developed. The client was a local support group that didn’t have a lot of money. Since the site didn’t expect much traffic and GoDaddy’s price seemed reasonable I figured I’d take a chance. The site went up without difficulty and everyone was happy.

Shortly after launch, the site owner asked for a forum. No problem I said, figuring I’d just use Ray Camden’s ColdFusion-based open source Galleon Forum. Here’s where the trouble started. You see, Godaddy cripples scripting languages. Of course, they don’t tell you this up front. You have to either know it going in, or scrape their Knowledge Base beforehand, otherwise you’re screwed.

I ended spending countless hours making a slew of modifications to Rick Root’s CFMBB, after which time I wrote an angry post stating how I felt about GoDaddy.

Recently, I was contacted by the same group with a new request for survey functionality. Since the forum episode, I’ve learned to research whether hosting providers cripple tags before signing up with them. I also learned that the good hosting providers will lift the ban on request, so I called Godaddy to ask that createObject be taken off the black list for my site.

Granted, the 90 year-old woman that answered the call was pleasant enough. I explained to her that I’d like to have the createObject function enabled for my site. Although it’s likely that she could have told me some very interesting stories about World War II, it was immediately obvious that she had no clue what ColdFusion was or what in the world I was asking. After explaining what I needed a second time, presumably so she could write it down on a piece of paper which she could hand to someone else, I was placed on hold.

Seven or eight minutes later the inevitable answer was relayed. She explained to me that that function was disabled BUT I could use custom tags if I wanted. Uh ok, custom tags. Gee thanks, custom tags are great and all but what I asked for was createObject! Sorry, no can do. I argued the point for a while but it was like trying to talk about the newest innovations in aerospace with a caveman.

So, I’m now left to either convince my client to move off GoDaddy or to write the system myself.

Before you jump all over me about sucking it up and writing my own code I want to point out that this is charity work on top of my regular job and my freelance work. I was hoping to find a solution that I could drop in quickly and move on.

I also realize that I can use cfinvoke for ColdFusion objects, however, Soundings also uses Java objects, so I’m screwed there too.

I was totally prepared to write a glowing review of Godaddy retracting my previous statement regarding their shortcomings. I was actually hoping to write that post. Instead I’m left to restate what I thought all along:

Godaddy SUCKS!

-rG

At best it’s been a learning experience. At worst, it’s been a nightmare. The basic site went up easily enough…all HTML. Then came time for the forum. First I tried Ray Camden’s open source forum, Galleon. Unfortunately several of the queries contain subqueries which are supported in MySQL 4.1 and up. Godaddy unfortunately is still running MySQL 4.0.24. In addition to that issue, there are also a number of disabled ColdFusion features including the inability to use CreateObject which is used liberally in Galleon. I changed all of the createobjects to cfinvokes and began rewriting the queries but it soon became a very tedious process and I decided to look for an alternate solution.

Next I attempted to download iPostMX, Cole Barksdale’s open source CF forum, but his site was having difficulties and I was unable to download the software. I gave up on CF for the time being and moved on to PHPBB which I was unable to install for reasons I was never able to surmise. Then it was CommunityServer, a wonderful community with a wealth of add-ons that comes free with a Godaddy account. The forums installed and after 2 escalated calls to Godaddy support I was able to use it. Unfortunately, I soon ran into a problem when I tried to use the Photo Gallery feature. Apparently the transaction log filled up and, because the database was not stored on my domain I was unable to truncate it and Godaddy was unwilling to assist.

Exasperated, I searched for another solution and came across Rick Root’s expansion of Galleon called CFMBB. It installed easily enough and Rick had already rewritten the problem Galleon queries. I then quickly converted the createobjects to cfinvokes (I had already done it once before when setting up Galleon so I had a good idea of what needed to be done). Pessimistically, I went to the site and to my pleasant surprise, it worked…for the most part anyway.

I ran into issues with calls to the java timeZone class and had to remove all references to that but all told it only took me a few hours to get it set up and working. I plan to write up my modifications soon for anyone to use. I couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t the only disappointed Godaddy user out there as I Googled from one issue to the next.

In the meantime, if anyone reading this post is going through the same struggles I went through, leave a comment and I’ll be happy to help out!

-rG

PS: Special thanks to Brian Rinaldi for his assistance on several of the issues I was having and for providing such a fantastic open source CF list!