# More GoDaddy Woes

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-godaddy-woes/64642>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [August 15, 2006, 2:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-godaddy-woes/64642 "2006-08-15T14:12:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/cab0a1/32.png) [@srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/srogers)\
**Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 2:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-godaddy-woes/64642/1 "2006-08-15T14:12:08Z")

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My GoDaddy Rails site has been plugging away for a couple of weeks.  
Its just a proof of concept with very little use. I haven’t updated  
it or restarted FCGI at all. But today, it just quit working  
altogether. In the error log, I’m getting:

(104)Connection reset by peer: FastCGI: comm with server  
“dispatch.fcgi” aborted: read failed  
FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server  
“dispatch.fcgi”

I did some searching on these, and most of the suggested cures were  
to reinstall FCGI. I deleted the session files, restarted the FCGI  
processes, but nothing changed the behavior.

At this point, I’m wondering if maybe its just my particular server  
that’s hosed, or if GoDaddy has upgraded something in the environment  
that might be affecting Rails and FCGI in general - anyone else using  
GoDaddy seeing a sudden onslaught of weird behavior around Wed  
afternoon? It’s starting to look like this is a cheap and easy  
solution, but not necessarily workable even for an app that you just  
want to demo now and then . . .

SR

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/cab0a1/32.png) [@srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/srogers)\
**Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 2:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-godaddy-woes/64642/2 "2006-08-15T14:16:12Z")

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Steven,

I completely feel your pain. Over the past month I’ve struggled with  
GoDaddy time and time again. I was helping a friend with an app that we  
got running two weeks ago and last week it stopped working out of  
nowhere. There haven’t been any code changes and I started seeing this  
message in the production log:

product.rb:2: parse error, unexpected tCONSTANT, expecting $  
vti\_timelastmodified:TR01 Aug 2006 17:07:07 -0000

So I opened up a ticket and got the following response from GoDaddy  
support:

“Thank you for contacting customer support. Unfortunately we are unable  
to provide third party scripting assistance via this forum. We apologize  
for any inconvenience this may cause.”

No insight to what was causing the problem, just a friendly “it’s your  
problem not ours” answer. Like I said this came out of nowhere and I’m  
now investigating other Rails hosting services.

I too think something has changed with GoDaddy’s hosting environment,  
but am to the point where I’m ready to switch. They’ve caused me too  
much time and frustration and my app performance is horrible! Even  
running FastCGI I’ve run into 10-15 second response times for basic  
requests.

At any rate, I just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone and  
needed to vent a little 🙂

Good luck,  
Dennis

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/cab0a1/32.png) [@srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/srogers)\
**Post date:** [September 4, 2006, 2:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-godaddy-woes/64642/3 "2006-09-04T14:45:23Z")

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Just to add to the go-daddy bashing, although this isn’t rails  
related…

I had a dedicated server, in production, with GoDaddy. One day, the  
server  
started going down for no apparent reason. Keep in mind, this was in  
production with a few sites that have reasonable traffic.

Several calls to support and the same response “please put in a reboot  
request”. The request can only be scheduled in 15 minute intervals. As  
soon  
as it would come back, it would go down within 2-3 minutes. Then I had  
to  
wait another 10 minutes for a reboot request.

We kept calling were eventually told we were overloading our server (we  
had  
3 web sites and about 100 email boxes) and basically it wasn’t their  
problem  
because they can’t support anything that we are running that is causing  
it  
to go down.

After some deep investigating throughout the evening (during the brief  
periods between reboot requests), I found the core-temp had been getting  
pretty high generally right before the server would lock up. After  
telling  
go-daddy this, they finally decided to investigate. They found there was  
a  
bad fan on our server and it was causing the system to overheat and  
shutdown.

Needless to say, we were really pi$$ed about this. For the first few  
hours  
of the issue, GoDaddy wouldn’t even acknowledge the problem could be on  
their end, and wouldn’t even investigate. They had kept telling us they  
were  
looking into it. We were watching “who” on the server, and nobody had  
ever  
logged in. Now, of course, hardware fails all the time, I can’t be angry  
about that— but the level of service and responsiveness by GoDaddy was  
horrible… as if it really didn’t even matter to them (not that I  
suppose  
it does).

The best is that while we were waiting for a response from level1-tech  
who  
was waiting on a response from level2-tech, he said “You know, I see  
here  
your account has a few domains up for renewal, would you like to  
consider  
renewing for 5-10 years?”. He then asked if we would like to switch our  
server plan from month-to-month to a yearly contract. I just laughed.

When the fan finally got switched, we got a new server with rackspace  
and  
cancelled the godaddy one a couple days later. I even transferred my  
domains  
off their registrar (paying transfer fees to the new registrar) just out  
of  
spite.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/cab0a1/32.png) [@srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/srogers)\
**Post date:** [August 15, 2006, 2:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-godaddy-woes/64642/4 "2006-08-15T14:17:37Z")

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Dennis B. wrote:

> I completely feel your pain. Over the past  
> month I’ve struggled with GoDaddy time and  
> time again.
> 
> I’m now investigating other Rails hosting services.

I’ve been using a2hosting for the past month or so with very good  
results.  
I recommend you check them out.

Best regards,  
Bill

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/cab0a1/32.png) [@srogers](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/srogers)\
**Post date:** [September 4, 2006, 2:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/more-godaddy-woes/64642/5 "2006-09-04T14:45:26Z")

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Bill,

Thanks much, I will check them out. As a follow-up to my previous email  
I was able to finally get the app working after hacking a bit and  
finding this in the error log:

“Cannot find gem for Rails =1.1.3:  
Install the missing gem with ‘gem install -v=1.1.3 rails’, or  
change environment.rb to define RAILS\_GEM\_VERSION with your desired  
version.”

Supposedly GoDaddy only supports 1.0.0. Yet changing RAILS\_GEM\_VERSION  
in environment.rb to 1.0.0 still caused problems:

“Cannot find gem for Rails =1.0.0:  
Install the missing gem with ‘gem install -v=1.0.0 rails’, or  
change environment.rb to define RAILS\_GEM\_VERSION with your desired  
version.”

I decided to comment out that line completely as a last resort and the  
app started working. Who knows, it will probably break next week, but  
at least it will buy me some time until I make the switch.

Thanks again,  
Dennis