Recently I got some hosting space with GoDaddy. I’m planning to use it to play around with WordPress, and experiment with some other site ideas.
So far I’ve actually gotten a chance to do that with a friend’s site. Granted, I’ve mostly broken it — but so far I’ve also managed to fix it, barring waiting for some DNS stuff to resolve to see what else is left to do.
Now it’s time for me start breaking my own stuff. So I’m going to be setting up a WordPress blog in my GoDaddy hosting space. I’ve never done this before. I know it’s supposed to be easy, which is why I’m a bit apprehensive. It’s the simple, easy stuff that usually knocks me in the bollocks.
Wish me luck. Or give me tips. Here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish:
- Set up domain1.com as the primary name for the hosting space.
- Set up domain2.com as a WordPress blog, inside of domain1.com
- Successfully install and configure WordPress
- Setup domain2.com so you can type it in and everything stays as domain2.com, even though it is on domain1.com
Amazing how difficult this seems to be. For me, anyway. Any advice is much appreciated.
So her blog should be up soon? Not that she’s going to need it for a few days…
Moo.
Aye, soon. There are still some issues with the domain bit I’m sorting out, as far as redirects go, but blog is functional again.
Unfortunately, I think what you’re trying to do might be impossible.
What you want if I’m not mistaken, is a virtual hosting set up. For instance, http://www.billypics.com, is hosted on the same server as http://www.thetribalunderground.net/, but it’s a virtual host that appears as a completely different website to the world, even though it resides on the same machine.
When you buy hosting from GoDaddy, they sell you a virtual host. You are but one of many virtual host on their huge racks of physical servers. Thus, they won’t configure your server to let two different DNS addresses point at two different Document Root’s on the main webserver unless you pay them for another virtual host, since that’s what they sell, essentially.
If you are only using DNS, you are either going to have to host your blogs in folders like I do, or I believe you can change your DNS entries to create things such as http://brightness.thetribalunderground.net/, which isn’t configured coincidentally, so that link won’t work.
Hmmm, makes me wonder if I didn’t research enough. You have control over subdomains and such, and you can also alias different domains to the same hosting account – I thought that was how you’d be able to do it.
Could be wrong though.
What are some specific questions I should ask their support?
If what you’re saying is the case for this hosting package, what’s the alternative?
Thanks so much for that feedback. I’m completely new to this part of doing websites, so I’m sure that I’ve only begun to make mistakes!
Yes, you have control over subdomains because you control the DNS records that point to your host.
antsaint.antsaint.com would be a subdomain of antsaint.com. antsaint1.antsaint.com would be another subdomain.
You can also do directories, such as antsaint.com/antsaint/, antsaint.com/antsaint1/…etc…
But what you can’t do is have something like, antsaint.com, and anthonyrules.com both pointing to your hosted account. Unless they can do tricky stuff on the server side for it. Well, that’s not entirely true. You could easily point both entries to your hosting account, but you would see the same thing under each URL, and one or the other would likely break your internal link structure.
See, the way virtual hosting works is that if someone types in, say in my case, http://www.billypics.com, that ties out to the DNS server, which returns my IP address. When that request is passed to my server, the webserver itself reads the domain name being requested, and gives it the index.html from /var/www/billypics/, instead of the one in just /var/www/. So from the outside, it looks like a totally different site. If any other requests come in with a different URL, you get the index.html from /var/www/.
You host might be able to hook up something like that for you, but that exact same mechanism is what they use to give you your own page on their big shared servers. So somewhere along the line, you point your DNS record to whatever address they give you for your account, and off you go. If you want to be able to point two different DNS entries to your site, and have it return different pages, they would have to set up a second Virtual Host entry in your server config, which I’m guessing in their eyes would mean you should be paying for a second account.
Am I making sense? I’ll help any way I can..I just don’t know if I make any sense.
I’ll post my cell phone number on the tribe if you want to call me for clarification. 🙂
Why Godaddy? Dreamhost has huge storage and bandwidth limits, and does auto installs of WordPress (for free) amongst other things.
michaelsean – I went with GoDaddy because I like them, and I was curious. I didn’t really shop around for this, and that was conscious. I’m not tied to them though – if things don’t pan out quite right then I can always switch. I’ll check out Dreamhost if I do. How long have you worked with them, and what do you like the most?
cid – as always, you are a lifesaver. Everything you said is currently filtering through my wee odd head, and I think you’ve explained things pretty clearly.
One question: given the virtual host setup, and that I do have control over subdomains, could I do a subdomain instead of a folder? eg, antsaint.com/yadda, yadda.antsaint.com… and, to muck things up more, forward or cpanel in a different domain to point to that?
I wonder because that’s essentially my Typepad setup. The real address is antsaint.typepad.com, but antsaint.com is cpaneled to point here, and my antsaint account is mapped to antsaint.com. Perhaps that’s the rub?
Good on ya for going with WordPress. It does everything I want, quite a few things I didn’t know I wanted, and more. If the feature you want isn’t built in, someone’s whipped up a plugin for it. Any questions, feel free to ask. I’ve hacked up my install a bit, so I know something of how it works.
Sweet, thanks JV! I’m pretty excited – I love Typepad and what it does, but I’ve just been more and more curious about going more from the ground-up.
Any particular plugins you’d recommend/ absolutely love and could not live without?
I had some issues setting up WordPress on Godaddy also.
I wrote a post to help others out.
Here it is –
http://www.idano.net/how-to-setup-wordpress-mysql-and-permalinks-info-on-godaddy-hosting-54.htm
Cool posts, thank you for adding them – I hope all is still going well with your GoDaddy & WordPress combo.
I know some people are having problems installing WordPress on a web server hosted with GoDaddy, but I did it(with the economy plan), so you should be able to do it too. I made a tutorial, please follow the link…
http://www.tutoriel.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=38
Thanks Mel! Jodie just changed hers over actually, I’ll tell her about your tutorial.
I’ve just started with GoDaddy and WordPress myself. WordPress rocks! In fact, it rocks so much I wanted to use it twice on my account, once as a front page for business-type stuff and again for the blog features for a photo-a-day project. Regrettably, I’ve not figured out how to have two installations on one hosting account, but I’m working on it.
If you figure out the subdomain thing, let me know. 🙂
I’ve been pretty impressed by what I’ve seen too. Jodie uses WordPress for her blog; I’ve been caught with inertia though – oh yeah, and working on our house – but migrating to WP is still a possibility that I’m kicking around.
As I understand it now, I don’t know that you can do the two installations for the shared hosting. It may require separate accounts, but I wouldn’t quote me on that. Have you seen anything in Codex, where other people might have tried?
I use one account for two different blogs myself. Just install WP twice, once into your main domain and once into the sub domain. I have mine at http://www.violinjodie.com and http://www.violinjodie.com/blog. It works just fine.
I can’t remember what I did with the databases though. I may have made two separate databases on my GoDaddy Account. Definitely look at Codex, and if it’s hard, call GoDaddy. They are great with help.
I am thinking of using Godaddy for wordpress. Should I stay away from them? Is there anything I should ask them? From what i’ve seen here it is a mixed bag. Please let me know.
Kelly
I’ve heard mixed opinions of using wordpress with godaddy hosting. I love Go Daddy, but for a wordpress site, look around for hosts that specifically talk about wordpress – there’s a lot out there. Dreamhost comes to mind, and so does NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
If you are having “Internal Server Errors” or would just like to make your WordPress site faster on GoDaddy then check out my blog post. I wrote it to help people with the WP-Cache plugin causing “Internal Server Error” on GoDaddy.
http://www.givveronline.com/wordpress/godaddy-internal-server-error/
Now it’s much easier using the Godaddy Hosting Connection panel. The panel can be used to install many available scrips and wordpress is one of them. It took me 5 minutes without having any experience with wordpress:
http://www.FactoryPattern.com
Best Hosting? No… The worst website hosting is Godaddy. Their hosting services are the complete opposite of their registrar services. They have very unusual restrictions in plans (like a limit of 1000 e-mails sent per day in a DEDICATED SERVER, lol). These restrictions are hidden in it’s “sales technics”. The support is very slow, take more than 24 hours to answer questions. No guarantee, no refundable, no respect, no shame to provice a deficient service. They win money with it’s hosting services lying to customers. It’s probabbly an outsourced service. Terrible. Flee from its host services!!
If you run into problems with Permalinks (mod_rewrite and .htaccess) not working, here is what to do: http://zacvineyard.com/blog/2008/10/24/wordpress-godaddy-and-permalinks/