Archive for the ‘Administration’ Category

GoDaddy as a webhost

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

I’ve recently been poking around on a Q&A site, and stumbled upon a question about GoDaddy hosting. Since I’ve had some experience here, I answered. The answer was so long and detailed, I thought I’d save it for posterity here.

I’ve had good and bad experiences with GoDaddy hosting. My clients choose their own webhosts. I’ve probably worked with about a dozen clients on GoDaddy (shared) hosting. I work primarily in LAMP development, so the following comments apply only to the Linux servers.

The pros:

  • Their control panel tools are fantastic. You have 30 days of snapshots of your entire site if you need to roll back a filesystem, and it’s easy to pick and choose selections from an old snapshot to update. Very comprehensive.
  • The telephone support is 24-7 and it’s not just some guy reading a script. Most of the support guys I’ve talked to are pretty good, stateside folks who will really help you find a solution if they can. I’ve had a few disappointments in the past, but they’ve really stepped it up recently.
  • their new GridServer shared hosting, while still shared, is load-balanced for a better response time.
  • If you have domains with them, the DNS manager and connecting to the hosting is super painless.
  • They are inexpensive for what you get.

The cons:

  • Support and sales are the same thing. Sometimes it feels like the support solution is to sell you something else.
  • The older “legacy” shared servers are slow as molasses.
  • There is some kind of disconnect on some of the sites I admin with the database. The filesystem comes up likety split, but any mySQL queries hang, sometimes up to 20-30 seconds.

Overall, they are in my top 5. As far as security goes, it’s hit or miss. With any shared server, you are only as secure as the guy with the password “password”, but GoDaddy seems to have some protocols in place for that that many discount hosts don’t (proper chrooting, etc.)

Other hosts I’ve worked with and liked:

  • Deep Discount: BlueHost, JustHost, HostGator — don’t expect a lot of support here, just basic hosting at a redonkulously low price
  • Moderate/Small business: Rackspace, MediaTemple — A little more for your money, although we did have a nasty rash on one of the MT shared servers earlier this year. Shared == vaunerable in any situation. If you can pony up for a VPS or a “Slice”, it provides superior performance and security (for a price) RS, GD & MT all offer VPSes.

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Mobile Devices and SSL

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I really do learn something new every day. I’ve been handing eCommerce sites for a while now (as well as some other types of secure sites) and I knew that Secure Socket Layer certificates (SSL) came in many flavors (and styles!), but I always thought of it like car insurance: if you want better coverage, pay more. If you just need to be covered to drive, get 1-800-Safe-Auto.

Well, today I learned something new, but it took some doing, so I’m hoping I can save someone else time and effort through the magic of Google search. Here’s the backstory: Mad Science Department got brought in a few months ago to help patch up and update an existing eCommerce site. We added true credit card processing, helped the client through the Labyrinth that is Authorize.net (which is a whole separate post, provided there’s enough Run in my beaker), and patched some security holes. In the process, we had the host apply a stock SSL. All smooth and cool, right?

This morning we got a note from the client’s local folk, saying that the client cannot access the site admin (under SSL) from a mobile device! Oh no! So after recreating the issue on my handy dandy iPhone, I contacted the host, who assured me that the SSL was working properly. Well, that’s a weight off my shoulders, but why isn’t it working for mobile? Host’s support didn’t know, suggested it had something to do with the phone. Hrumph.

So I checked the cert and tracked down the issuer. This is where a nice young man called Jeff comes in. He explained to me that the various SSLs actually use different types of encryption, and therefore some certificates which are perfectly good for web use simply cannot encrypt data over mobile networks (GSM,G3,etc.). In order to add this level of encryption, my client would have to upgrade to a higher premium, which would allow for more diverse and stronger coverage. Now I know.

I don’t usually give shout outs in my Lab Notes, but Jeff from Comodo was very helpful, so thanks.

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Posted in Administration, Open Source Software | 1 Comment »