I have been using Network Solutions for many years.  I purchased my first personal domain name from them back in 1999 and slowly moved my personal website and email to them over the years.  No really complaints on the hosting side.  But the cost to register domain names did seem high especially when I thought of the number I would need to launch this effort.

So, I started looking at GoDaddy.  The domain naming registration fees did seem cheaper and so did the web and email hosting especially when tied to a sale that seemed to be happening all the time.  So, I registered my first domain name and setup a web hosting account.  I decided to host on Windows because that was what I am familiar with working in IT and I had used FrontPage and FrontPage Extensions before.  The first problem was that I wanted to host a couple domain names.  So, I had to upgrade to the Deluxe plan from the Economy plan so I could host multiple websites.  The second problem started appearing with WordPress performance.  Though you can install and use WordPress with a Windows hosting plan, I found out many people also mentioned hosting problems.  I found some posts on GoDaddy’s support forums that made me realize an application like WordPress which is based on PHP and MySQL really wanted to be hosted on Linux.  Fortunately, they had a one step migration from Windows to Linux hosting which was great.

The final configuration issue that I wanted to share related to the structure of the web site folders.  The first website I wanted to host became the default domain in the folder structure.  I created a subfolder for the second website and pointed that domain name at that folder.  Everything seemed to be fine until I realized the I had really just created a subfolder in the default domain and it was browsable with that URL.  Not what I wanted.  I did some searching and found this article about GoDaddy multiple domains.  I decided to create the throwaway primary domain.  I did have to register another domain name but it seems to work out fine in the end.

One other issue about WordPress installation on GoDaddy.  Under Windows hosting, the URL had to be http:\\primarydomain\secondarydomain\blog.  Not ideal but everything worked fine.  Under Linux, you could install directly into the secondary domain which made more sense.

Last issue to mention.  Trying to do redirects on a Windows hosting plan using the web.config file is very difficult.  HTACCESS under Linux is so much easier.  Sure, you have to learn the syntax of both but HTACCESS just works.  Maybe if you were running non-hosted IIS, web.config would work but not practical to have a dedicated server yet.