Ordeal #1: Getting Started

I planned out my transition to the cloud completely. Then I found that GoDaddy had dropped support for the "MyLittleAdmin" tool.

In the end, I had to use Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio to completely script my database, including data. Then I had to cut-and-paste oodles of text into a remote SMSS window and run that script. That worked.

Ordeal #2: The Session Variables Debacle

One of the worst episodes was when, suddenly, my IIS server and ASP.NET stopped saving session variables between postbacks.

It took three calls over as many weeks to finally reach an admin who understood what I was talking about. It took him 10 minutes to reinstall ASP.NET on the server, and I was back on-line.

Ordeal #3: Unexpected Changes to File Access

Recently, my site just broke. Making a long story short, I found that someone at GoDaddy had changed the file and folder permissions on my entire site to make everything read-only.

My error was failing to check for a write exception after updating a trace log file I created during the previous session variables debacle. It took me a few minutes to fix the problem after I realized what had happened.

Ordeal #4: Dropping Support for Plesk

Now, GoDaddy claims they are dropping support for Plesk without any slated alternative for managing ASP.NET websites. What?

Ordeal #5: The Site Backup Fiasco

I was worried about site backup, so I let them talk me into buying their "Website Security and Backup" package.

That seemed OK until I discovered that the only databases they could backup were MySQL databases!

Needless to say, that was worse than useless.

Ordeal #6: The Overloaded Server Conundrum

Finally, I found that my site was responding very slowly, especially at certain times of the day.

So I changed the code to create smaller (640x480) versions of photos to speed load times.

That mostly worked, but the site is still slow. Why? Because GoDaddy has piled numerous websites onto a single server. I don't know how many, but there is no solution to this.

They only offered to move me to a private server, but that would cost 10x as much, and I'd have to become a sysadmin. I could do it, but avoiding that was the very reason I chose GoDaddy in the first place!