Godaddy Hosting

When I transitioned from the web server running in my house, I moved to a Virtual Private Server.  When that server had problems with connectivity, I moved to a Virtual Private Server with Godaddy.  This server worked very well for several years, but it started to need more maintenance that I want to do now.

Since I was really just using the VPS for a few WordPress installations and small web site, I decided to move it to a Godaddy Deluxe WordPress hosting plan.  The transfer of the sites went smoothly, but recently the server started returning 500 errors, when accessing simple web pages.  Since the hosting plan doesn't give you as much visibility into the processes that are running or access to the logs, as the VPS did, it hard to track down the problem.

I decided to move to more managed hosting.  I moved the blogs to WordPress.com.  Since the static sites are pretty simple, I decided to move them to Google Sites.

Moved to hosted WordPress

I have decided to move my blogs to Godaddy's host that comes with WordPress preinstalled/preconfigured.  Management is very easy, and I am now able to use WordPress' built in plugin update mechanism.  Also, Godaddy will manage update the WordPress install.

I was easily able to export the posts from my the WordPress installations on my Virtual Private Server, and import them into the new installation.  I was able to test the new setup, before changing my DNS records, so I was able to make sure everything was working before I made the switch.  

WordPress for web site

A while ago, I wanted to set up a new web site.  I didn't want to hand edit the html, as I usually do, so I decided to use Godaddy's Website Tonight to create the web site.  Website Tonight is a web based site management system where you can use GUI tools to edit the look of a web site. The tools are done in such a way where you can easily change the theme, and have it apply to all of the pages.

I have been having some problems with Website Tonight, though.  There is a bug in the UserAgent handling in the editor.  It doesn't recoginze Firefox 3.x as a recent version of a browser.  So I am forced to use Internet Explorer in my Windows XP virtual machine to edit the site.  In addition to that, some of the widgets that they have available have some problems.  For example, Godaddy makes a rss widget available to embed an rss feed in a web page.  The widget doesn't have some of the configuration options that I want.  For example, I want to include the text from the rss items themselves, but I don't want to include the text from the channel element.

I think that WordPress will work perfectly for what I want to do.  I can create multiple pages in WordPress, and they will automatically appear in the navigation for the site.  I can also use WordPress's WYSIWYG editor to edit those pages.  In addition, I know that WordPress doesn't have the problem with UserAgent detection.

Since WordPress natively deals with blog items, I am sure that it will be very easy to create a page that has one category of posts.