Musings of a technophile

Well, it took me like a month of thinking about it before I finally decided to create this blog, and even then I had some problems installing WordPress on Godaddy.  While it doesn’t seem to be a problem to set it up on a Linux hosted account, setting it up on a windows account is a different story.  Apparently the problem lies in that if you have an older account (a.k.a. – an account that is more than just a few months old at this point), your hosting account is on IIS 6.0 with PHP 4.x something.  Apparently the PHP 4.x is the problem, as you need PHP 5.x in order to handle to correct DB connections to MySQL.  Since the old accounts don’t have to updated MySQL connections, the WordPress install script fails to run the database commands correctly in order to install it.

I guess for a few months this stopped quite a few people from getting WordPress to work on a Windows hosting account – they would either change hosts, or change the hosting to Linux, or do a few hacks that would make WordPress still only about 60% working.

The solution is much easier now though.  Godaddy’s newer hosting pacakages use IIS 7 and PHP 5.3 so the install really is almost as easy as the “famous 5-minute install” that WordPress proclaims.  If you have an older account, you can call Godaddy up (or I suppose do it through their website – I find calling them to be much easier and painless) and in about 3 minutes they can give you a seperate one month only hosting package (whihc costs you $6.99).  You set this package up Making sure to set the hosting type as IIS 7 and then all you have to do is re-upload your files to the new site.  After this is done, you call Godaddy up again and tell them to transfer the remaining time on your original hosting account to the new hosting account, then close the old hosting account.

There are some caveats to this still obviously.

1) If you only have one domain name, you will have to remove it from your old hosting account and then add it to the new one – meaning with DNS changes and other things that you site could be down for about 24 hours.  You can set the DNS entries in the old hosting account to 30 minutes to sort of minimize this effect when you make the change over (make sure to wait 24 hours after changing that setting though).

2) You will have to set EVERY option back up int he hosting account – meaning backup and restore the database (if you have one) change IIS settings, application roots, etc.

Still – since I have multiple domains on my hosting account, I was able to move all but one of my sites over without any downtime.