Our Experience With GoDaddy 500 Internal Server Errors |
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 September 30, 2008 |
We started this blog back in March, 2008 and decided to go ahead and turn my existing photography site into the wonderful gaming blog you see today. The reason for this was convenience and the fact that we had no money at the time. Our money was actually tapped out on a site called 1PStart.net which was up and running for one long week before AN Hosting shut us down. We somehow had one of our first articles hit the front page of Digg and we almost immediately locked out of our accounts. We were even locked out of FTP access and never got the opportunity to recover our files. AN Hosting is certainly another interesting topic for another day. The quick solution was to simply start up a new blog fast (since we only had one week invested in that one) and keep things rolling. I had my photography website (Kezins.com) up for a couple years, but rarely got any traffic and it wasn’t a high priority of mine. Changing things over to a game blog was simple and we already had the URL and hosting set up.
Once we got things rolling on Kezins.com hosted GoDaddy, we went ahead and upgraded services to make sure we had things set up to handle a decent amount of traffic. Unfortunately, we have gone through spells where the site loads really slow or we get hammered with “500 Internal Server” errors. Anyone who runs a site hates those with a passion. Unfortunately, Juan and I are tech savvy but we’re not exactly database programmers or high end web designers. People in our shoes have to rely on customer service from the host.
Between March and September, I’ve probably had no less than 50 conversations GoDaddy’s tech support. Juan has also been in contact with them at least a dozen times. Asking them to help us find the problem was simply a futile effort in the end. With each call made or email sent, we would receive a completely different answer. With the giant stack of answers I received, not one was correct.
Last night, I decided to check the web more for possible reasons. I have literally spent hundreds of hours trying to fix this site over the past few months with no results. Our content was good and 97% of the time we were up, but 97% is not acceptable to us. I discovered an article “GoDaddy 500 Internal Server Error” and it was the simple answer to all of our problems. This article detailed how Wp-Cache simply does not work GoDaddy servers. I found this odd considering there’s no mention of this anywhere GoDaddy’s website and this possibility was never mentioned by the tech team. I was suspicious that the tech support people never once bothered actually looking into the problems on our site. They would simply throw out random answers to get us off the phone. Wp-Cache is something I have used on every single blog I have ever created. It’s probably the most widely used plugin of all WordPress plugins next to spam filters. Fortunately, this site also provided an edited version of WP-Cache that is modified to work GoDaddy. We’ve loaded it up and it works like a charm.
This entire frustrating experience leaves me with some serious doubts GoDaddy. I plan to send them a detailed email in the morning asking for some answers. I’d like to know how we could contact them so many times and never get an answer that was even close to the real problem. I’d also like to know why they are the only host that has this problem with a commonly used plugin.
The big thing is that these guys are supposed to be the experts, not me. I’ll admit that I started this blog as a novice when it comes to designing and managing WordPress from the technical side. My experience in the past was mostly writing. The only good thing that has come out of this is the fact that I pretty much know the inside and out of every file on our site.
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