UPDATE (2/2/09): GoDaddy even on deluxe/premium/unlimited hosting accounts, applications (eg. .NET application root) is configured as virtual directories. Thus the ApplicationRootPath is still rooted on the ROOT of the hosting disk space. This makes sense I think and so even if domain points to say ROOT/subfolderA, Response.Redirect("~/Page.aspx") will still point to <domain>/subfolderA/Page.aspx and it will appear as such in the browser.

Last post for Jan 2009 and just wanted to say that on top of upgrading to IIS 7, I also upgraded my hosting subscription to GoDaddy Unlimited (diskspace, traffic, databases - though there is 200MB hard limit on DB size).

Along with this is the support for PHP 5 which means I would be trying out a couple of PHP and MySQL apps.

My web development life actually started with a little PHP + MySQL instead of .NET but as I haven't practiced them and addicted to intellisense and drag and drops and along SQL server just came along with .NET so somehow I'll be brushing up with them a little bit. Maybe not in detail but trying out some apps like Joomla, WordPress which are popularly used.

With this expect a couple of posts on these topics.

Starting with the fact that as of this time GoDaddy DOESN'T support (or have installed) the Microsoft URL Rewriting Module for IIS 7 for some reason (at least as of this writing). This is one of the useful features (and sought of features for IIS) but when I have to rewrite stuff and I get HTTP error 500 (since rewrite is done in the system.webserver element and any error there will cause HTTP error 500) I called up their customer support and only then I knew they don't have this important feature yet. I would have known better but the PHP support for IIS 7 is still a good deal.

Another issue is how IIS7 handles plus sign (+) and spaces in the path. Reported a DNN issue on this and still working on resolution.

Thirdly I had to point domains to subfolders in my ROOT hosting account and I had problems with DNN on this. Basically DNN appends the folder name and I read around for a fix but didn't work until I combined two fixes. Will have a separate entry on this but if you need info now just feel free to drop me a message.

Next, Joomla. Test installation to a subfolder and implementing SEO friendly URLs resulted in CSS issues (links to CSS files seems to be invalid -I think something to do with /index.php/ in the paths). Yet to further investigate thisi but none for also. Without the SEO friendly URL setting though, it seems fine. Furthermore then I've solved this issue, will have to deal with the same issue with DNN mentioned above. Nothing much to say at this point except that unlike apache which has mod_rewrite and referenced in a lot of issue resolutions found online, IIS7 doesn't have that. In line with this, also tried out a couple of third party rewriters like one from ManagedFusion which uses mod_rewrite syntax and thus easier to use existing htaccess setting to resolve issues. More on this soon...

And then, Wordpress. Having issues similiar to the DNN subfolder issue about. In this case, if I set the Blog URL (General settings) to just the domain name (without the subfolder) then the site works. However if you have permalink settings aside from the default (eg. using ?p=n or ?page=n) then I get HTTP 500 errors.

Did I also mention that GoDaddy restored a previous backup of my files without my knowledge?? I give them credit for coming clean and eventually confirming it (the reason is because - allegedly some of my files got lost - what the heck, all was fine until they overwrote them). This is a major2x issue and it's a good thing I have I do backup my upload files locally and I actually have a local Subversion installation. So all bold face for this. DO NOT TRUST GoDaddy (or you hosting for that matter) solely with your files, have your own backup (regardless of how your hosting claims to be reliable). This is a very serious issue and GoDaddy lost my confidence on this one. But weighing the pros and cons, I'll still retain this one but not for my mission critical apps. And besides, I just confirmed that they indeed do daily backups. If it were indeed their fault you can always ask for the latest backup restore (assuming they admit it though). I have suggested some tracking mechanism for this and worse comes to worst that they cause damage to your operation by overwriting files, I'm pretty sure you have a way to get compensated.

Moving on, NO comment on performance yet but I don't expect this to be peformant and if any of the sites I will be hosting have considerable traffic, I'm pretty sure I'll need to move to another hosting eventually (or VPS or DS - thought unlikely). Plus the 200MB DB size on each database, have to watch out for that.

But for the meantime, aside from work and other things, will be busy with setting up online communities etc. I'lll be sure to share whatever I can ;)