When I
lost my job a week ago I mentioned that I was considering hanging up a Community Server shingle. So today I tested the Independent Contractor waters and installed CS 2.0 for a new client on Go Daddy.
How I ended up doing the job is a familiar scenario, someone emails me with questions about something in CS; I provide a couple of answers to help out and the person asks me what my rates are. You can tell pretty quickly if the individual you're communicating with is in over his or her head on a Community Server install, upgrade or mod. Actually, in this instance I knew my new friend was going to have serious problems all along the line trying to install CS 2.0, so I asked him if I could do it for him. A couple more emails to lock in on rates, provide an estimate and establish some trust, and the deed was done. And I'm really happy I was able to do this Go Daddy installation today. I got to work with CS, I got paid well for it, and I made a new friend in the process. With a regular day job I never would have been able to help this guy today.
I'll talk specifically about my Go Daddy experience, but I wanted to sidebar into Community Server Economics and why its smart to spend a few dollars on getting CS support instead of spending days on a site install. I may be justifying a business plan, I don't know, but my client today sent me a PDF he obtained from the CS Forums that someone wrote specifically on installing CS 2.0 on Go Daddy. It had lots of pictures and instructions and on the surface seemed like something useful.
Here's an excerpt.
Donations: My first install onto godaddy took 3 solid days (18 hours) to figure out. This documentation took another 8 hours to create. That means your taking advantage of approximately $5,000 of consulting. Obviously, I’m providing this FREE of charge, but if you care to make a donation, small or otherwise, I would be very willing to accept. I started reading this thing and thought, "No WONDER the guy is confused!" The document was 62 pages long! And I thought, 18 hours! $5000 dollars! Dang! Good work if you can get it, I guess. Or, on the other hand, you could get someone who knows what they're doing who will spend 6 hours (or less--I had FTP and Go Daddy issues :-) from start to finish by grabbing the CS Web Install Version .ZIP, do some FTPing, create a SQL database, run the installer and configure the site. Actually, I also duplicated the site on my Home Office and walked through all of the configuration steps to make sure everything was covered when I performed them on the Go Daddy server. So in those 6 hours for thoroughness I essentially setup and configured two sites.
The author of this document thought he was doing a good thing, but it's like a Dr. George Sheehan anecdote on running that I read in (I believe)
Running and Being. Some guy is embarrassed to tell George how long it took him to complete a marathon, something like 9 hours. But instead of saying something critical, George says, "You mean you ran for 9 hours straight???"
So, about my Go Daddy experience. I'm a WebHost4Life man, and as much as I've complained about them, I've also praised them plenty, too. And I'll have to say as far as web hosting services, WH4L has Go Daddy beat hands-down. The Go Daddy Control Panel is okay, but not nearly as informative or as robust as WH4L's Control Panel. The Go Daddy site FTP server kept crapping out on me while updating CS 2.0, and I had to reconnect and start where leaving off about 10 times until I had the entire site online. If you've ever uploaded CS 2.0 to a shared host provider, you know how painful
that was. And no, there was no option to upload a single .ZIP on Go Daddy and unzip it like there is on WH4L. There were other issues I had with Go Daddy as well, like the inability to MS Query remotely and not being provided with basic site configuration information anywhere, like the name of the SMTP server, for instance, which I only found through the generous input from the CS User Community at
CS Forums.
Bottom line, there was nothing uniquely problematic about installing CS 2.0 on Go Daddy, any more than installing CS 2.0 on WH4L. I would definitely not recommend Go Daddy as a Host Provider for CS 2.0 though after comparing today's experience with working on WH4L servers. Go Daddy might be a great DNS provider, but this is another case where in my book it's better to go with a Host Provider whose first and primary business is being a Host Provider.
I'll leave you with this in closing,
"Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you in the state of Vermont, a new Community Server site was born..."Well, you know the rest.
[tags: Community Server, Go Daddy, WebHost4Life]