WebPublishing.me

After you’ve managed to get WordPress installed on your GoDaddy server (hopefully you didn’t get the dreaded “GoDaddy WordPress database error“), you’ll probably run into file permissions errors. To fix the problem, you need to give your WP-Content folder read/write permissions. Here are the steps involved:

1) Login to your GoDaddy account.

2) Click “My Account” in the top right.

3) Scroll down to “My Products” and click “Web Hosting.”

4) Launch your “Hosting Control Panel.”

5) Click “FTP File Manager”

6) Select the checkbox beside your “wp-content” directory, then click the “permissions button” near the top of the screen.

7) Deselect the “inherit” checkbox, and then select “read” and “write” so your permissions look like this:

8) Click “OK.” Now you should be update your WordPress theme, upload photos and do all the other great stuff WordPress lets you do.

If you’ve installed WordPress on a Linux server in the past, you’re probably amazed at how easy it is. Then, when you get a client who ask you to install WordPress on a Windows-based GoDaddy hosting account, you get the dreaded “Error establishing a database connection” message. I wrangled with this problem for about 20 minutes tonight. Here’s a possible fix if you happen to encounter the error: change the “localhost” setting in your WP-Config file to the actual location of your database. Not sure how to do that?

1) Login to your GoDaddy account.

2) Click “My Account” in the top right.

3) Scroll down to “My Products” and click “Web Hosting.”

4) Launch your “Hosting Control Panel.”

5) Click “Databases/MySQL” from the tabs at the top of the hosting control panel.

6) In the “Action” column, click the small pencil symbol.

7) You should now see a field titled “Host Name.” Copy the string, which will look something like this: “abc.db.9999999.hostedresource.com”

8) Open your WP-Config file.

9) Scroll down to “/** MySQL hostname */” and paste in your “host name” like so:
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘abc.db.9999999.hostedresource.com’);

10) Upload the modified WP-Config file back to your server and visit “http://NameOfYourSite.com/wp-admin/install.php” Hopefully your wordpress blog will now be up and running!

After you’ve gotten your blog installed, you may want to verify that your GoDaddy file permissions are set up properly for your WordPress blog.

Sometimes it’s the simple questions that are the hardest to answer. Finding GoDaddy’s FTP location, for instance. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re always trying to upsell you on something, but it seems inordinately hard to find what you’re looking for. So, for my own memory, and perhaps to help some wayward FTPers out there, I’m going to post the path to find GoDaddy’s in-browser FTP location:

1) Log in.

2) Click “My Account” at the top right.

3) Click the domain you’d like to edit near the middle of the screen.

4) Click “Hosting.”

5) Click “Your Files” in the upper left where it says “Manage Site Content.”

Ding dong the witch is dead. You’re in. Good luck.