Why has my hosting become so slow? That is the question I found myself asking about my GoDaddy account after a few months of having this website. In this “off topic” article I wanted to discuss my problems for this site when using GoDaddy and why I chose HostGator as my new hosting company. I’ll also discuss how well things have gone since switching.

My Problems with GoDaddy

I can break my issues using GoDaddy into a few different categories but it really came down to one issue: inconsistency. To be more specific, these were the areas where I had issues:

Database Performance
This was the first area where I started noticing problems. I found that static web pages (like HTML pages) always loaded great at GoDaddy. However, as soon as I started using a database (both with Ruby on Rails and later with WordPress) the performance went downhill.

The confusing part about this was that some days my site would load in a few seconds while on others it would take up to 20 seconds to load one page! There were times the pages would never load at all and just timeout which is just unacceptable. With Google recently stating that page speed can affect a site’s search results, it became even more unacceptable.

GoDaddy is by far the biggest hosting provider and the general consensus they really struggle to balance their users across their databases. Things may be going along great for a long time and then a few active users are added to your database server and everything slows down.

Support Issues
Again, the problem for me (aside from having to pay long-distance for the calls) was inconsistency.

At times, I would call in and get bad advice, given with the greatest degree of confidence, only to find out later it was the wrong approach to solving the problem. But then other times I would get super helpful support where I could tell I was dealing with someone who knew the issues well and who was able to help me fix things pretty quickly. Also, GoDaddy was very quick to insist that software issues or setup were not their problem which was very aggravating. The problem with that argument is that it can very subjective and some support people seem very quick to jump to that explanation.

One Other Issue…
The last straw for me was when I got a virus on my site. This was at a time period where a large number of GoDaddy hosted sites were being compromised. The official word from the company was that this was a user issue because certain settings or software versions were incorrect. Well, I didn’t fall into any of the categories they listed as a user issue but no one could explain why I was affected. It was at this point that I had to admit to myself that it was time to find new hosting. After moving away from GoDaddy, I read of people who were being repeatedly compromised even after “fixing” things as instructed by GoDaddy so it seems that my hunch was right.

A Desire to Not Switch (and Tips if You Don’t Want to Switch)

I really didn’t want to leave GoDaddy. Often, I found the service to be adequate and honestly I didn’t want to deal with what I saw as the hassle of migrating to another service. As I’ve posted here in the past, I went out of my way to solve my issues within their hosting service. I feel like I helped solve two pretty big issues for myself and other users of GoDaddy, both of which I discussed on this site:

• WP Cache on GoDaddy 500 Error

• Setting up Ruby on Rails with GoDaddy

I also liked having one account for both my domains and my hosting (which I suspect is a big draw for many people who find themselves using GoDaddy). I spent two-and-a-half years using GoDaddy but eventually switching was finally worth the effort. As I began to take my blog more seriously, the idea that my site would be unavailable or extremely slow at random times just didn’t feel acceptable any longer.

Still, I’m sure there are a few people out there that would like to stick it out with GoDaddy, maybe for the same reasons I had. If this is you, I can give you a few recommendations for your site:

• Use W3 Total Cache: If you are using WordPress, check out W3 Total Cache. It won’t make things perfect but it will make things better. Just keep in mind, this will only take you so far. A slow database will still be a slow database and if you begin to attract significant traffic this will be inadequate

• Creating a New Database: This is a trick I found to work pretty well. First, backup your current database then create a new database in your hosting account. Restore your backup to this new database and then point your application (for me, WordPress) to the new database. This actually worked well for me a few times since (I’m guessing) I ended up on a new database server that had less users on it. This solution only temporarily helps since the new database can slow down as well. Keep in mind this is really a game of chance! You could actually end up on a slower server.
• Stay Up-to-Date: GoDaddy offers options such as upgrading your hosting software version which would do things like move your site from PHP4 to PHP5. I would recommend doing this as early as you can. Because GoDaddy is such a huge company, they are a big target for hackers and older software versions do create a bigger risk.

Why I Switched to HostGator

Based on my previous hosting experiences, I felt I had identified the two areas most important to me: performance and support. These two areas are where I started my search for new hosting.

As I’ll discuss, I decided on HostGator and I went with their Reseller Hosting. All the reviews I saw of Reseller Hosting raved about the performance. Now the Reseller Hosting is much more expensive than what I was paying at GoDaddy (I now pay $24 a month) but I wanted to luxury of not having to worry about the speed of my site. I figured that the Reseller Hosting was a nice stepping stone from shared hosting to something bigger (if I ever need anything bigger). Also, a great thing for me about the Reseller Hosting is that I was also able to move my wife’s website to the same reseller account so I could manage it from there, improving the speed of her site and helping offset the total cost of my hosting. Anyway, on to why I chose HostGator:

Support
No matter who you choose, every hosting company is going to have problems or issues. If it is impossible to totally avoid ever having problems, then I want to choose the hosting company that handles problems the best. I found the support reviews for HostGator to be universally good. I actually couldn’t find anyone who complained about it. Just looking at the top of their home page compared to GoDaddy shows that they care about support. Can you spot the difference between these two page headers?

If you look closely, you’ll see that support from HostGator is 100% free. Actually, it isn’t just free, HostGator is paying to support you with the 800 number. This is normal and should be expected but it is not the case with GoDaddy. I think a new rule for me having now used a support service that requires I pay long-distance to get support is that I will only ever use a service that makes getting support both easy and free.

Performance
HostGator was generally well reviewed for their performance. Where I couldn’t find anyone who complained of the support I was (eventually) able to find people who complained of the speed. Still, the majority of users wrote very good reviews for HostGator performance. Plus, as I researching hosting options I never found a hosting service where everyone was totally happy with performance, so it seemed as safe a bet as any other service. As I mentioned above, I went with Reseller Hosting to be safe but I have heard the HostGator shared servers perform relatively well.

Web Site Migration
In addition to those features that were important to me, HostGator also offered help on moving your old web site to their hosting server. After signing up, you can fill out a form to have them migrate things for you. You have to provide them your old account information but that’s to be expected if they’re going to do the work for you.

45-Days to Decide
The last thing that won me over was that they provided 45-days to decide if the service is working out and if it isn’t I could get my money back.

Unused Hosting Time
As far as I know, all hosting sites give you your money back for any unused time. While this isn’t specifically a reason to switch to HostGator, it is a reason why you shouldn’t feel like you would need to wait until your current hosting subscription ends.

My Experiences with HostGator To-Date

This article would have never been written if things hadn’t gone well but I’ll elaborate on how things have gone anyway:

Support
Within the first week of switching to HostGator, I needed support on testing WordPress before I updated my name servers. Working with HostGator’s support was kind of amazing. There was a point where I felt like we had done enough but the support person suggested that he continue to research the problem regardless. I actually felt bad that he took 2 hours to fix an issue for me just so I could test something before fully migrating my site. My first support call (and later a chat session) showed to me that everyone who talks good about HostGator’s support wasn’t joking around: they take it seriously!

Database and Hosting Performance
To-date, my site has been loading great. In over three months, I have had one page fail to load one time. Aside from that one instance, I’ve noticed no slowness and every page has loaded fine. I guess if you’re curious you can test for yourself by clicking around my site but my experience has been nothing but good.

While I’ve seen great performance improvements, I’ve seen even more dramatic improvements on my wife’s site since moving it to my reseller account. She runs a wedding photography business so her site is very image oriented and ran horribly slow before switching. Her pages wouldn’t load at all unless I used a WordPress caching plug-in. Now, they load in a few seconds consistently.

If you’d like to test the performance for yourself, just start loading random pages on this site or on my wife’s wedding photography site and judge for yourself. Unfortunately, I can’t show you what the performance was before but you can still see what it is like now.

Final Thoughts on Switching to HostGator

Overall, I’m thrilled with the choice I made for hosting. A few thoughts on if you are going to move away from GoDaddy:

• I kept my files on GoDaddy for the first 30 days of the 45-day guarantee at HostGator. I did this so that if I found HostGator inadequate I could just point my name servers back to the old hosting. While I doubt this would be necessary, I would still recommend making that option available to yourself although 30 days might be over-doing it.

• When you cancel your old hosting, I would recommend calling in to do it (yeah, you’ll have to pay long-distance once last time). I called in to cancel my hosting and they were very pleasant and understanding. I called in to be sure I was refunded for my unused time and to ensure that the refund went to the right account.
• If you decide to try HostGator, use the promotion code GREEN during the checkout process and it will save you 20%. This only works when you are signing up the first time, though.

I still don’t hate GoDaddy like some people seem to. They are still my preferred place to manage my domains. I think in some sense they are just too successful to support everyone using their service. If you have a small business where you are only going to ever need static pages (HTML/no databases) or where database performance is not an issue, I can see GoDaddy as a viable option (especially considering it is convenient to manage your hosting and domains from the same account). Otherwise, if you’re looking for new hosting my recommendation is HostGator. They’ve done right by me and based on what I’ve read, I’m not the only one.

Check out HostGator for yourself.

Related posts:

1. Setting up Ruby on Rails with GoDaddy
2. Using WP-Cache on GoDaddy (500 Error)
3. Repairing a Crashed Table in phpMyAdmin

#144 – Table ‘./wp_posts’ is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed

By no means am I a mysql expert. I’m still not sure why this even happened. However, this was actually not very difficult to correct in my case (once I found the cause and a few mysql forums) and I wanted to share the steps I went through to correct this:
1. Sign into your phpMyAdmin account
2. Click on your database name on the left
3. Then click on SQL in the tabs on the top
4. In the query box enter: repair table wp_posts and then click Go. (note: you’ll need to replace wp_posts with whatever table you are having an issue with if it’s not this table)

For me this took a little while to finish (probably less than one minute). After that, things were working well again. Obviously, this isn’t going to work in every case but if you’re lucky like I was, maybe it will. I’m still a little nervous as to why this happened in the first place but at least I now have an up-to-date backup if it happens again!

Related posts:

1. Setting up Ruby on Rails with GoDaddy
2. Installing Disqus on WordPress Is Amazingly Simple
3. Massive Drop in Google SERPs after Installing All in One SEO Plug-in

Now that I’ve seen the iPad, I suspect that Amazon’s first thought on seeing Apple’s newest product was relief. The iPad is more laptop than e-book reader.

First, as far as readers goes, this thing is large. I love that my Kindle easily passes as a book with the right cover. Carrying it with me through the airport or around town draws absolutely no attention because it simply looks like a book. Throw a cover on the iPad and you’ll have what looks like a briefcase.

Second, with the iPad being backlit I think it will make for a poor choice as an e-reader. It’s funny because my first thought when I bought my Kindle was disappointment that it wasn’t backlit. I couldn’t have been more wrong on that one, though. The fact that it’s not backlit makes it so easy to read. Reading on the iPad looks like it would be the same as reading on my laptop. I’m sure the Apple fanboys will soldier through and rave about how great it is to read on the iPad but having used the Kindle I’d never want backlit for reading again.

Also, does anyone else really dislike the name iPad? Aside from the fact that MadTV had a joke about this very product name, I just don’t like it. It’s very similar to my initial thought on Nintendo’s Wii. Like the Wii, I suspect I’ll hear so much about the iPad so very often that I’ll eventually forget my initial thoughts on the name…society will beat the name into my subconscious until I don’t even remember ever not liking it!

The iPad looks awesome as a multi-purpose tech tool/toy. However, for those who think this is going to be knocking off the Kindle as the most popular e-reader, I just can’t agree (yet). I think the iPad is designed to be a little bit of everything in a very cool package. Because of this, it just doesn’t appear to have the pinpoint purpose like the Kindle does. Every design choice made for the Kindle had reading in mind and that’s obviously not the case with the iPad. Do I think people who own the Kindle will be buying the iPad? Absolutely. But I also believe they’ll keep their Kindle close at hand when they’re looking to read.

If you’re thinking of the iPad as a cool new addition to your tech collection, I say go for it. If you’re thinking of getting the iPad just to use exclusively as an e-reader, I would recommend researching the Kindle a little more (or any other device specifically for reading). At least try to read a free eBook on a computer screen and decide how easy you think it is. I suspect the size will be mildly annoying when traveling but the backlit screen will be the real problem as an eye killer. Obviously all this changes if Apple drops some kind of bomb about switching to some type of reader mode!

Why I Love My Kindle

• It’s easy on the eyes. Even reading for hours puts no strain on my eyes.

• It really feels like a book. Even a week after owning it I would occasionally reach up to the upper right-hand corner in an attempt to turn the page.
• It looks great with a nice cover and passes as a book easily.
• Free internet access via Whispernet.
• The book prices are great plus there are plenty of free books to download. I suspect I’ve saved around $40 buying books on the Kindle over the last few months – well on my way to making my money back.

A Few Tips for New Kindle Owners

• If you’re buying an old book, be sure to try to find the free version. For example, with Sherlock Holmes being released in theaters I was interested to give the books a try. There are plenty of versions that will cost you money but there are also normally free versions if you look long enough.

• Be sure to switch to offline mode when you’re not on the internet or shopping the Kindle store (Menu then Turn Off Wireless). This will save you on battery usage and switching back online only takes a moment.
• I found locating the web browser a little tricky the first time: from the Home screen select Menu then Experimental then Basic Web.
• To turn on text-to-speech hold down Shift and then hit Sym. Give it a few seconds to start (if you hit the key combination again too quickly you’ll end up turning it back off again).

I guess I shouldn’t complain about Apple fanboys since I’ve obviously become something of a Kindle fanboy myself. I think the Apple fans do have a lot to be excited about but I also believe that Kindle owners have nothing to worry about. As Steve Jobs said, the iPad is “way better than a laptop, way better than a phone.” I think it’s important to notice that he stopped there.

For those interested, you can learn more about the Kindle 2 here

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Love, Sex & Deception
2. Book Review: The Five Love Languages
3. 5 Love Languages: Learn Your Language

At any rate, I am simply amazed at how easily the install went. Not to suggest quality WordPress plug-ins are normally a problem…because for me they’ve all gone fairly smoothly. I just anticipated this could be difficult considering the entire commenting system will change.

I wanted to provide the steps I took so any of you out there hesitating because of concern over the installation would know there’s nothing to worry about. I’ll be listing the steps I went through although there’s more than one way to end-up at the same result.

Installing Disqus on a WordPress Blog

1. Creating you Disqus account.
   I had created my Disqus account months ago so I could comment on some blogs I read. The process is fairly standard:
   • Browse to the Disqus Signup and then fill in your desired user name, password and email address.
   • At this point you could configure connections to your twitter, Facebook or other accounts but I’m going to skip this. Instead, click on Avatar Picture. If you are already using Gravatar, you can use that photo. If not, either sign up at Gravatar (this would be my recommendation since you may comment on non-Disqus sites) or upload your image.
   Signing Up at Gravatar
   • Browse to the Gravatar Signup and enter your email address.
   • Check your email and click on the link from Gravatar
   • The link will redirect you to setting up your account. Enter your desired user id and password.
   • You will be able to upload an image from your computer or the internet as you avatar (or Gravatar I suppose).
   • Finally, you will rate the image of your Gravatar which, for most users, will be G or PG.
   • That should be it for Gravatar…back to Disqus!
   • If you added a Gravatar photo, click on “Avatar Picture” again. Your Gravatar photo should appear as an option. You may need to allow a few minutes to pass for your Gravatar image to register on Disqus.
   • Click on Public Info and fill in a display name, your website. You can also enter your location and a short bio if you want.
   • Now you’re done setting up your Disqus account.
2. Installing the Disqus Plug-in
   Installing this plug-in is similar to most other plug-ins. Configuring the plug-in left me asking a few questions but not because things were unclear, just because there were many options to consider.
   • Log into your blog’s WordPress administrative page
   • Click on Plug-ins on the left and then click Add New and search for “DISQUS Comment System”. The results should show the official Disqus plug in first when searching this but be sure to verify that the plug-in is by Discuss.com (should be the last part of the plug-in description)

   

   • Click Install on the far right and then click Install Now on the pop-up screen
   • The plug-in should install and a link at the bottom should appear “Activate this Plug-in”. Click this link.
   • After activating the plug-in, you should see a message at the top of the screen stating that you will need to configure the Discus plug-in before you can begin to use it. Click “configure the plug-in”.
   • You should see a log-in screen for your Disqus account. Enter your information and click Next.
   • At this point you will either see your blog as a choice to register the commenting system with or you may need to register it again. I’ve set up Disqus twice for WordPress now and once it recognized the blog associated with the Disqus account but another time it require that I register the information when configuring the plug-in. To register:
   • Click the Register a new one link
   • Enter your URL and a title for your web page. Click Continue.
   • At this point you can associate different applications with Disqus for your site but for now click Continue. You can always configure these later.
   • At this point you will need to go back to your Disqus configuration (WordPress Admin then Settings then Disqus)
   • Once your site is listed as an option, click the radio button and click Next

   

   • Now you should be done with one last important step.
3. Importing Your Old WordPress Comments
   This was my main reason for not moving to Disqus: an assumption that I would lose all my old comments if I moved to a new system. Considering how few comments I get compared to my traffic, I’m not sure why I was worried about this at all really. Having seen what Disqus brings to the table, I now think losing my old comments would have been acceptable. However, that doesn’t matter since Disqus will allow you to import your old comments:
   • Within the Disqus moderation screen (which you can now get to by clicking on Comments in your blogs Admin screen), click on Advanced Options
   • On this screen, click Import which will sync your WordPress comments with Disqus

At this point, everything should be configured and working. It only took a few minutes for me to see my old WordPress comments appear as Disqus comments on some of my older posts.

You’ll want to review all the settings for Disqus and configure things as you wish. On the Manage screen click the Settings table to view these options. Steps I took included turning on Facebook connect, Twitter login, Yahoo! Login, OpenID and Akismet for WordPress (several of these will need API keys but none of it is hard to accomplish).

Overall, I’m very impressed with how simple it was to install and configure Disqus. Had I known things would have gone so smoothly I would have done this months ago!

Update 5/9/2010: I’ve decided to turn off Disqus, at least for the short-term. I’ve been trying to optimize the speed of this site and it appears that in most of my testing, Disqus has been the bottleneck when it comes to loading. If removing this has no affect on my site speed then I’ll happily go back to using it (since as a commenting system I do think it’s pretty cool). However, if my site performance does improve, I’ll likely be waiting for better performance from Disqus before I use it again.

Related posts:

1. Massive Drop in Google SERPs after Installing All in One SEO Plug-in
2. Repairing a Crashed Table in phpMyAdmin
3. Using WP-Cache on GoDaddy (500 Error)

I’ve been thinking about doing some online dating profile heading testing (that’s a mouthful!). I’m hoping to share the results here as I currently have a theory that weird or hard to understand headings may work as well as any other. At any rate, while thinking of a good profile heading to test out I came up with first in the list below. I thought it wasn’t too shabby and thought I could come up with nine more for a good post on developer type headings. Here’s what I’ve come up:

1. Software Developer Tired of the Singleton Pattern
I think this one is my favorite that I’ve thought of since it can be understood even if you’re not familiar with development patterns.

2. SELECT * FROM OkCupid WHERE Girl = ‘Great’;
I suppose the more romantic amoung us could add a LIMIT 1 (or TOP 1 for those Microsoft DBAs). Hopefully it goes without saying that OkCupid would be replaced with your service of choice!

3. C++ Girl Looking for A++ Guy
This one’s not that great for non-developers since you don’t want to suggest you’re a ‘C’ level person looking for an ‘A’ level partner!

4. Date GreatTime = new Date(WithMe);
For those confident individuals among us.

5. DBA Looking for Relationship Normalization
Aren’t we all looking for a little normalization in our relationships?

6. if (single) { profile.contactme! }
Perhaps this invitation is a little too open! You could always make your condition a little more strict. If you hate Ruby you can always drop the bang. Obviously Ruby works nicely here.

7. if greatGuy goto myProfile
I know, I know…using a goto is such a bad practice!

8. require ‘date’
This one’s about as simple as they get. More ruby syntax here (C#’s ‘using’ and Java’s ‘import’ just don’t work as well!)

9. Web Developer with a Great Sense of Style(sheets)
Geeky yet playful.

10. Open Beta – Looking for Some Good Testers
I don’t really like this one but I couldn’t stop at 9!

Think you can do better than this? Feel free to share it here.

Related posts:

1. Improve Profile Views with your Heading
2. A Profile Review
3. If I Am Shy, Should I Mention It In My Online Dating Profile?

In the book, Aarron discusses the All in One SEO plug-in for WordPress so I went ahead and installed it for my website here. When I was setting this plug-in up, I decided to turn on canonical URLs as the plug-in help described that this would help prevent duplicate content from displaying. This sounded like a great idea to me so why not? After setting all this up I called it a night and went to bed.

When I got up the next morning, I could see that my traffic had dropped off by 90%. As a matter of fact, the last visit in my logs was from Google itself. Prior to that visit, I was getting my normal traffic from Google but afterwards I had zero references coming from Google. Obviously I found this very concerning: in my attempt to improve my traffic I had lost almost all of it!

The drop was so severe my first assumption was that Google had penalized me in some way so I used the Site Reconsideration for to send an inquiry. I also went through my content and tried to clean up anything that might appear “bad”, although everything I’m doing is legitimate as far as I can see according to Google’s guidelines. Still, ignorance of the law is not a defense against it so better safe than sorry.

My next step was to review the changes I had made the previous night with the SEO plug-in.

• I decided to try disabling the canonical URLs setting.
• I left the description and keyword changes in place. Surprisingly enough, my site had been running without either tag since its inception. I say this is surprising because this is one of the few areas that I was familiar with before reading Aarron’s book so I’m not sure how I missed it. I found someone complaining about how changing these can do major damage but my thought was “done is done”. If the damage to my SERPs was due to changing these, I didn’t imaging changing them again was going to improve my situation.
• I turned my title rewrites off for no real good reason aside from the worry that changing my title caused the problem.
• I read over the other settings but decided to leave everything else alone.

I then started looking at Google Webmaster which was quite the depressing process. I had not looked at it for quite some time and didn’t even realize how many of the keywords I ranked at 1 or 2 in the SERPs. This was depressing because checking each of these links at the time showed that my site wasn’t within the first 15 pages for any of them. Even my off-topic Ruby on Rails posts had disappeared. Anyway, I made the following changes in Google Webmasters:

• I set my preferred domain to include www.
• I then added a sitemap.xml to the “http://littleredrails.com” version of my site in Google Webmasters. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake but I was trying to make sure Google could find me. Obviously this is silly as Google can find me and I was creating a sitemap for a domain I had just specified as my non-preferred but I was in that situation where I just wanted things to work again.
• I had a sitemap that was missing and had an error next to it for the “www” domain. I deleted this from the Google Webmaster page. Now the only site map was the one being auto-generated by the Google Sitemap Generator plug-in for WordPress.

In retrospect, I made far too many changes at once from a trackability perspective. I guess my knee was jerking enough to be considered a chronic problem. The rest of the day my SERPs remained in the toilet, however, when I got up in the morning everything was back to normal. Once again, I could see where Google visited my site and shortly after traffic started flowing in again. At this point I believed that canonical URLs had wreaked havoc with my site for some reason. I sent an update to Google stating that I no longer needed reconsideration; the problem was not related to any penalization from them. Things were great…right?

Well, the next morning when I got up once again saw zero traffic after Google’s last visit. As before, prior to the crawl from Google traffic was great. I had posted over at seochat when the problems had resolved to get some input. Since things went to crap again, I decided to update my previous inquiry and was told that using 301 redirects would be the best way to go. I feel like maybe my inquiry wasn’t fully understood but I decided to just take the advice and updated my .htaccess with:
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^littleredrails.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.littleredrails.com/$1 [R=301,L]

After another day and a few more crawls from Google, though, things remain bad. I re-enabled my title rewrites through the plug-in and fiddled around with Google Webmaster tools some more by removing some secondary sitemap files but nothing seems to be improving. So now I find myself at a loss. Maybe the problem is still somehow related to the canonical changes, maybe I’m just not waiting long enough for things to update at Google, maybe changing my meta tags has universally reduced my SERPs…I really don’t know.

Last 7 Days of Unique Visitors

My site doesn’t even get that much traffic. It’s more a labor of love: the desire to help people and, if I’m honest, some pride that in my Google rankings. It not as if I’m losing money because of this turn-of-events (I’m not). It’s more about the feeling something I’ve worked very hard on has disappeared over night. Well, I can still see it…it’s everyone else that it’s disappeared for! Today, I just find myself wishing I had just left well enough alone. I wish I would have not tried to retroactively change things and just moved forward with other areas described in Aarron’s book. Or, at the very least, I wish I would have learned a bit more about the settings before I started changing them.

Live and learn I guess. I’ve posted this here in the hope that I’ll be able to update it with good news someday and perhaps provide some direction for those who find themselves in the same situation. Sadly, chances are until the problem is “fixed” no one will even see this!

Below are some articles I found interesting while researching this problem:

• Traffic drops and site architecture issues: This one wasn’t very helpful in regards to my situation but the myths were interesting.
• Canonical Url Errors with All-in-One SEO WordPress Plug-in: This one was helpful at least from the perspective that I could see others had problems with canonical urls. I felt like the article was well-written too.
• All In One SEO Getting A Bad Rap?: This was something of a response to the post above. I was kind of surprised by the tone of the responses here. The article above seemed to politely say: “Hey, maybe some of these settings shouldn’t be on by default” to which the responses were along that lines that “someone mindlessly updating plug-ins deserves what they get”. Those are my words, not theirs but that’s the feeling I get reading the responses.
• All in One SEO Pack PageRank: This article seemed to describe my problems although according to it I shouldn’t have had any problems since my WordPress address URL is the same as my blog address URL. Also, I’ve never cared about PageRank (it was always about the SERPs to me, even when I didn’t know what SERPs meant).

My hope is that things will magically repair themselves over the next few days. I’ll continue to try some small things and will update this post if I make any progress. If all my minor attempts to correct this fail I may just take this opportunity to get a better domain name and start over. I’ll 301 this domain to the new but if my rankings stay the same it may as well be considered starting over. LittleRedRails.com is hardly the best name I could have for an online dating based web site anyway! I’ve never put much weight in my domain name but if I’m starting from scratch, why not?

October 11th Update
Based on the comment from Martin below, I started looking into the cache Google had for my site. In particular, I was looking for any spam links that might exist if my site were compromised. I didn’t find any but I did find something interesting in the cache: Google still had the canonical link tag in it:

<!-- All in One SEO Pack 1.6.6.2 ... -->
<meta name="description" content="..." />
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.littleredrails..." />
<!-- /all in one seo pack -->

So the cache still had the canonical link even though I was no longer using it. After realizing this, I’ve monitored the Google cache over the last few days waiting for the cache to be updated. This morning I saw that the cache had been updated and canonical link is missing so I checked my web stats…and they have skyrocketed.

Now one question that still remains is why did I have one day in the middle of all this where things were fine? When Google starts collecting updates for their cache, is there a time period where they’ve dumped the old cache but not yet recorded the newly collected cache? If so, this could explain my single day of recovery:

Day 1: Traffic is fine.
Day 2: Canonical is enabled. For the time being, traffic is still fine.
Day 3: Traffic is bad. Google has started refreshing the cache for my site and has thrown out the old cache so all searches are not based off any cache at all.
Day 4: Canonical has been removed and traffic has improved. Google is still not using any cache as it is still being collected or queued to be saved.
Day 5: Cache update has completed and traffic is bad again (Google now sees the canonical link again since it is using the cache originall collected on Day 2 or 3)
Day 6-10: Traffic is bad and the cache continues to show the canonical link.
Day 11: Site cache has been updated for the second time this time without the canonical link. Traffic returns to levels of Day 1.

This is all wild guessing from someone who has only begun to learn about SEO. But you want to know something? From my research over the last few days, it appears that with SEO everyone is just guessing (although in different degrees). So maybe I’m way off with this guess but if so I’m in good company.

Also, I’d like to thank Martin at WealthyDragon.com for his suggestions on the cache. I appreciate that, unlike some, Martin didn’t try to tell me exactly what my problem was and instead gave me a direction to head in.

Maybe I’m entirely wrong about the cache and canonical link causing the issue. It sure does appear to be what happened but with everyone getting behind canonical urls it would be very strange that using it would be so devastating to my SERPs. For now, I’m avoiding canonical urls like the plague. Through my reading this last week, it has been repeated often enough that duplicate content isn’t going to hurt me much or at all. If using canonical urls doubles my PageRank but halves my SERPs I think I’ll pass.

With any luck, this will be my last update!

Related posts:

1. Installing Disqus on WordPress Is Amazingly Simple
2. Using WP-Cache on GoDaddy (500 Error)
3. Spotting Fake Profiles with Google Images

Back when I first got littleredrails.com, my intention was to utilize a technology known as Ruby on Rails. Over the next few months, due to situations out of my control, I realized I was not going to be able to use the site for my original purposes. Eventually, I decided to record my online dating experiences and that is how this site reached its current state.

I was looking through some old documents recently and found steps I had created for myself in getting everything to work with GoDaddy (something that I found rather difficult). While this is way off-topic from my normal dating posts, I thought it might be helpful to provide the information here for anyone else struggling with the GoDaddy/Ruby on Rails combination.

One last thing before I get into the steps: I have no clue whether or not these steps will work any longer. It’s been about a over year since I wrote this and thing may have changed greatly then. Hopefully, the process has been more streamlined and these steps are no longer needed.

Ruby on Rails with GoDaddy

1. On the Hosting Manager Control Panel, choose CGI Admin
2. Create a Rails App directory. Leave this window open.
3. On the Hosting Manager Control Panel, MySQL and select create a new database. Remember: the user name you enter will be the name of the created database.
   NOTE: I’d suggest performing your database creation early on in the process. I ended up waiting on my database to exit a pending status for some time. While waiting wasn’t horrible, I was anxious to continue working.
4. Download FileZilla. This is optional but the FTP steps listed here are using FileZilla.
5. Connect to your site with FileZilla and copy all files located in your rails app directory. I skipped the log and tmp directory and just created these directories manually since I didn’t want to upload their contents.
6. Go back to the CGI Admin window and create a symbolic link:
   • In the second box click Show Rails Apps
   • Select the rails app and enter a link name, such as “church” or “blog” (without the quotes). You will now be able to use website/link to access the pages.
     NOTE: You cannot have a symbolic link with the same name as a directory. This caused me problems because I wanted my symbolic link to match the name of my application. What I did to get around this was I renamed my actual rails app directory and then created my symbolic link with that name. In other words, I changed the app directory from x to y and then created a symbolic link of x. This was a personal preference and not required by any means.
7. If you don’t have a text editor that can do Unix line returns (or aren’t sure if you do) take the steps below. You may want to follow these anyway if you are not using a Rails IDE.
   • Download and install RadRails
   • Open RadRails and on the navigation pane (on the left) right-click and select New > Rails Project.
   • Enter the name of the project (the same as the app)
   • Uncheck “use default location” and browse to your application folder. For example, I entered
     C:\InstantRails-2.1a-win\InstantRails\rails_apps\app_name.
   • Uncheck the Generate Skeleton option and the Create WEBrick server option (assuming you already have a rails project to deploy, these options are unnecessary).
   • Click Finish
   • On the toolbar, select Window -> Preferences.
   • Expand the general tree and then select the Workspace node.
   • Change the new text file line delimiter from Default to Unix and click OK.
8. Open the dispatch.cgi with your UNIX line-ending-friendly text editor and replace the first line with #!/usr/local/bin/ruby
   NOTE: On the GoDaddy help page they say to replace this line with #!/usr/local/bin/ruby/ (trailing slash). When I tried this, my application would fail to load (this is as of 8/8/06) so I removed the trailing slash and things worked fine. Some experimentation may be required.
9. Follow the previous step with the dispatch.fcgi and the dispatch.rb files. I’ve not found anything that states this is necessary with the dispatch.rb but I’m updating it just in case.
   NOTE: Editing files requires Unix line returns which is why RadRails was suggested. If you use an editor that uses Windows line returns you will get an error something like:
   The application failing to start”.
10. Upload the updated dispatch.cgi, dispatch.fcgi and dispatch.rb to the rails application public directory.
11. Right click on each of these files and choose file attributes. Be sure the numeric value for each is 755.
12. Go back to the MySQL option in the Hosting Manager control panel. Click the edit button and write down the name of your SQL server. It will be something like mysql123.secureserver.net
13. Edit your app_name/config/database.yml to contain the following:
    production:
    adapter: mysql
    host: mysql???.secureserver.net
    port: 3306
    database: dbname
    username: user
    password: pass
    Be sure to upload this file once changed.
14. At this point, you should be able to test your rails application by browsing to yourwebsite.com/symbolic_folder/controller/action (or whatever, depending on your routes). You can also browse to yourwebsite.com/app_name/public/controller/action if not using a symbolic link. While this will likely fail due to missing data the type of error you get can give you an idea of if you’re almost there. If you get an error about not being able to start the rails application then you have problems. If you get a general Rails Application error (the 500.html I think) or no error at all, you’re looking good.
15. At a command line, run: mysqldump development_db > textfile.txt. This will place all data from your development environment into a text file.
16. Under the Hosting Manager Control Panel, choose MySQL and then OpenManager for your database and log in.
    NOTE:For the life of me, I could not get logged in under FireFox. Perhaps this is some restrictive setting I’ve accidentally set – I’ve not yet been able to determine the cause. I switched to IE and was able to log in – just something to keep in mind if you’re running FireFox.
17. Click databases and then on the next screen click your database.
18. Click on the SQL link and then copy and paste your exported SQL into the web form. I had a very large amount of data (I was importing the King James Bible) and found I needed to break my SQL scripts into about 6 runs to get everything in. Depending on the size of your data one run may be all that is require. I was doing around 5,000 inserts at a time so it can handle a good-sized load (but be patient). I tried doing all my data in one shot but the page timed-out.
19. Once your data has been imported try out your site again (mywebsite.com/symbolic_link/controller/action). I was very pleased with what I saw: excluding images I was storing in blobs which I did not import, all the pages appear as expected.

Gotchas I ran into:

Starting Fresh
To really get to a point where I could get all this to work, I needed to create a new, basically empty, rails application (just ran rails testapp). The problem I was running in to was I kept getting distracted by little things related to my development application not, in 20/20 hindsight, issues related to setting up the rails app on GoDaddy.

FastCGI:
I was never able to get this to work. Whenever switching to FastCGI (as described here), my rails app stops working all together. The page would try to load for a minute or two then just stop. That said, I’ve read of others having success.

Public Images
I had some images in my public directory locally (development) and had coded these images into my layouts with just plain HTML. This caused problems when I moved to GoDaddy because the web server in this case is running one level above my rails_app folder so the src for the images was incorrect. The most correct thing to correct this (I think) is to use the rails image_tag helper. However, another way around this is to create a images directory on your GoDaddy root and place the images in there (giving public read rights to the directory).

Web Page Performance
Now, as mentioned above, I had never gotten FastCGI to work. That said, I was satisfied with the web site performance without it…but only due to my needs. My rails pages were loading in about a second in a half. That’s way slower than static pages but for my purposes (personal web site, testing of church web site, other non-critical things) it was acceptable. If you want to do anything serious, you would either need to make sure FastCGI is working or select someone more dedicated to Ruby on Rails.

Stylesheets, Images, Javascripts failing to be found
While fooling around with my .htaccess file in attempts to get FastCGI working, my pages stopped applying their stylesheets. I’m not sure how I broke it, but there is a line in the .htaccess file (around line 28) that needs to be inserted if using a symbolic link. Add this line if you are having problems:
RewriteBase /symbolic_link
This is actually documented in the comments of the .htaccess file.

Overall Thoughts
There were many frustrating points and some of the documentation leaves much to be desired. GoDaddy’s help documentation does address several of the issues. It’s just that other help documentation contains step-by-step instructions whereas the Rails documentation is more of a generalized “if you have this problem do this”. I was satisfied with the performance but have heard that this can be dependent on your shared-server load so maybe I was just really lucky. I’ve read several “horror stories” of people trying to set-up Rails on GoDaddy where they are now moving to either TextDrive or Dreamhost. Some issues like not being able to route the root web page to a controller, will make GoDaddy a poor option for the pure Ruby on Rails developer. If you’re looking for something to fool around with using Ruby on Rails with options for changing to different technologies in the future, GoDaddy will work fine. However, if you’re looking for a full-blown Rails solution with no plans to use anything but Rails, you’ll want to look into another option (or wait for GoDaddy’s Rails implementation to mature some if you are the very, very patient type of person).

Finally, as I mentioned in the beginning of this article, it has been a very long time since I’ve worked through these steps. If something is factually incorrect or just not clear, please leave a comment!
Resources:
Howto – Get GoDaddy Rollin’ on Rails
GoDaddy Troubleshooting Guide (Ruby on Rails)

Update May 2010: A quick note that I’ve moved away from GoDaddy to HostGator so I won’t be able to verify anything in this post going forward. I am very happy with my move and if you’re interested in the differences see this write-up on why I moved to HostGator.

Related posts:

1. Using WP-Cache on GoDaddy (500 Error)
2. GoDaddy Hosting Slow? Why I Switched to HostGator
3. Repairing a Crashed Table in phpMyAdmin

Related posts:

1. Updates to the Free Online Dating Guide
2. Online Dating Guide Posted
3. Online Dating Guide: A Success Story

This post has nothing to do with online dating. It has to do with a particular error, 500 Internal Server Error, when using WordPress and the plug-in WP-Cache on a GoDaddy shared server. My hope is that others who experience the issues I had might find this post and (hopefully) will be able to avoid the hassle I went through!

The Problem
WP-Cache is a plug-in for WordPress that allows web pages to be served quicker by requesting data from the database far less often. However, when this plugin is enable on GoDaddy a strange thing occurs: every other time you load the page you get a 500 Internal Server Error. When this occurs, I suspect most WordPress users on GoDaddy simply disable the plug-in. Unfortunately, if their WordPress site starts to generate traffic, GoDaddy will complain that they are creating too much of a load on the database server. So there appears to be a catch-22 in that GoDaddy doesn’t support the technology that would allow its customer to avoid the very problem the company is complaining about.

The Solution
1. Download the wp-cache-phase1.php in /blog_home/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/ from your web server.
2. Edit the file by finding the lines:
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {
header($header);
}
3. Replace these lines with the following:
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {
if (strpos($header, ‘Last-Modified:’)===FALSE) {
header($header);
} else {
// do nothing – makes GoDaddy angry
}
}
4. Upload the wp-cache-phase1.php to your web server and try refreshing some cached pages.

The Warning
As you will discover if you read below, I’m not very confident in what I am doing and I’ve stumbled through most of my testing. Implementing this change, while it may fix wp-cache, may create other problems. It may not, though. I really have no idea. Also, I was having problems with a header for Last-Modified – I have no clue whether others are going to see the same issue. My solution may not be a solution at all. All I can say is that in my opinion, it appears to work. At any rate, use this at your own risk!

The Explanation (From a Novice)
I am absolutely new to WordPress, PHP, Apache, etc. I am a Java developer by profession so I can read the code but I suspect many of the steps I took, which are described below, were an absolute waste of time created by my ignorance. My hopes are that an expert may be able to review this and explain better why the problem occurs (so I’ve included all the steps I’ve taken working on this issue). Also, if you are also a novice and are interested in understanding some of what I discuss, it would be best to review the readme.txt included with the wp-cache plug-in.

When I started reading about WP-Cache I immediately started seeing articles (for example, here and here) regarding problems when using GoDaddy. Depressing me even further: most of the responses I found seemed to simply write-off the problem as an unaddressable GoDaddy issue. Honestly, after seeing so many people state so convincingly that any 500 Internal Server Error is GoDaddy’s problem and nothing can be done to fix it, I was inclined to simply believe that there was no hope.

Regardless, I decided to give the plug-in a try hoping that maybe there was some difference between my GoDaddy server and everyone else’s (heh). The install went well and even the first time I loaded a page I could see it appear in my cache. My excitement lasted about 5 seconds: after a refresh I was viewing the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error. I fooled around with some settings on the plug-in itself but it did no good. Things appeared to be broken. Before giving up, I decided to view the source of the 500 Internal Error page, believing there might be some clue there. To my surprise, the entire code of my page was in the source! In other words, I was not seeing the expected 5 lines of source for the 500 error but rather 100+ lines of the page I actually attempted to load. This was exciting to me because now I could add some debug and try to determine where the problem was occuring.

My first thought was that if the page was loading, the first part of (wp-cache-phase1.php) was working and it must be the caching of the page to disk (wp-cache-phase2.php) where the problem existed. I found the line in wp-cache-phase1.php that called phase2 and commented it:
// wp_cache_phase2();
I reloaded my previously cached page but the problem persisted. This was a good thing, though, as I found the code in phase1 more understandable.

At this point, I started commenting out different sections of the phase1 code. I discovered all my problems disappeared when I commented out the foreach loop that creates the headers. I added logging to this section and found that I had two headers:

• Last-Modified: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 13:31:29 GMT

• Content-Type: text/html; charset=”UTF-8″

Then, instead of using the foreach loop, I manually tried each of the headers individually. Testing Content-Type went fine but testing Last-Modified and the 500 errors reappeared. At this point, I created a new php file to test the Last-Modified header (you can view the source here). I named this test.php and loaded it successfully (you can test it yourself if you would like. When I reloaded it, though, the 500 error occurred! At this point, I read a little on the Last-Modified header and decided to disable the cache on my web browser. Now the problem disappearred no matter how often I reloaded…so the problem seems somehow related to when a browser is deciding if it needs to request to redownload files (I’m out of my league at this point).

The Help?
And now, I am at a loss. I can implement wp-cache but only if I explicitly ignore Last-Modified headers. Will this create problems? According to this document, I should always send Last-Modified when able. I restored the old code to view the headers when the page displays properly versus when it does not (500 error) and they are identical:
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 13:59:19 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 13:31:29 GMT
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=”UTF-8″

200 OK

The fact that the 500 error occurs intermittently (normally every other time) is also very confusing. How is an identical Last-Modified header causing problems half the time? And why does disabling cache on my browser (Firefox) cause the problem to disappear?

If any experts out there want to weigh in on this, I’d love for you to do so. For now, I’m going to continue to use my “fix” by ignoring the Last-Modified when serving cached pages.

UPDATE (12/05/2007):
Reader Givver (see the comment here) has been kind enough to package everything here along with several improvements as well. Check it out here. Thanks Givver!

Related posts:

1. GoDaddy Hosting Slow? Why I Switched to HostGator
2. Setting up Ruby on Rails with GoDaddy
3. Massive Drop in Google SERPs after Installing All in One SEO Plug-in