Life is Digital

GoDaddy.com serves up low-cost registration and hosting very nicely. As part of the offer, they include numerous third-party applications. WordPress, a blogging tool, is one of the applications I tried on my GoDaddy hosting account. GoDaddy includes a simple tool to install WordPress. I used the tool every time I tried WordPress on GoDaddy.

Issue One: No support for blog.tjrutkowski.com

I want blog.tjrutkowski.com to point to my blog, but GoDaddy’s servers do not recognize the WordPress index.php as a home page on a sub-domain. Thus, every attempt to load the blog through the sub-domain fails. Several other GoDaddy customers have been blogging about this issue since 2006, but GoDaddy will not resolve it. It seems that the fix is a simple server setting for GoDaddy, but my fix is to use another provider for my blog.

Issue Two: Poor response

If my only blog problem was the sub-domain, I would have no problem. I simply created a redirect at blog.tjrutkowski.com to my real blog. Last month I pointed it to my Blogger site, but I recently changed to tjsr2.WordPress.com. Thanks to GoDaddy, I tried WordPress and prefer it over Blogger.

My issues is that when GoDaddy hosts my WordPress blog, things break! Using a standard template, custom hearder image, and 3 posts in my blog, and it took 2 minutes for the WordPress site to load from GoDaddy. Often, the connection would simply time out before the page ever loaded. I got the same painfully slow results from my work or friend’s computers.

Soultion: WordPress.org

My solution is to publish my blog directly at WordPress. “WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” So far, it has been fantastic! Thank you WordPress!

If I could ask for one more free feature, it would be for Picasa support. I had to switch to Flickr for simple photo and album integration.