GoDaddy -- The Interent Explorer of Web Hosts

I'm really loving using RapidBlog day in and day out now, it makes it much easier to keep a blog active -- I don't really know why that is except for I'm able to do it at work, the library, etc.

Anyway that's not the point of this point. The point is that I released a new version of Lockdown tonight (1.65U) that fixes a few different problems including making email work with GoDaddy.

You see GoDaddy is the 'Internet Explorer' of web hosts. Like Internet Explorer is very popular and in many ways an OK solution however like Internet Explorer it's almost, but not quite, standard. They have funky server configs and make may bizzare choices that cause me (as a developer who has 3 of his 5 plugins which require sane server configurations) a lot of headaches.

Case in point... I started getting complaints about email notification no longer working on GoDaddy. I fired up a test on my server (hosted by dreamhost.com) and all was well but after the third or forth person contacted me I dug in and figured out what had happened.

So here is the sad thing, I still don't know exactly what they did -- However I did find that by removing a single string from the email message it started working. For whatever reason GoDaddy decided that any emails containing the words "ip-lookup.net" should not go through.

I don't know, maybe they thought it was spam? Who Knows? Anyway I know use dnsstuff.com for looking up ip-addresses in the email. It's kind of frustrating because ip-lookup.net worked well but there you have it.

So I sent out the update to the folks who had problems and they all responded, to a person, that GoDaddy had been no help and showed no interest in fixing the problem -- Not at all cool.

So in honor of that I've set up a promotion code at my web host (dreamhost). It's NoDaddy Use it to get a new account and you get basically the maximum amount off I could give you (in most cases it's $97 off for the first year which makes your first year a total of about $30) -- I don't get anything out of this deal EXCEPT the satisfication of knowing more people are using a sane web hosts and it's fewer people I have to support on GoDaddy.