GoDaddy Tips & Tricks

17 Nov 2008 In: ASP.NET

After I have signed up with GoDaddy on the Windows Hosting plan, I've found out that there are actually alot of complaints and grumbles on the many limitations and poor technical support on GoDaddy.

Well, things that are cheap are of course comes at a price. Yes, GoDaddy's windows shared hosting is cheap, but there are workarounds.... so not to worry. Let's get started on the tips & tricks.

Tips & Tricks

Tip 1: SQL Express

If you're using windows shared hosting, you don't have access to the server to run the aspnet_regsql.exe against it. GoDaddy is very strict about what remote connections it allows to the live database. Also, be aware that GoDaddy doesn't support SQL Express (like those mdf database you normally saved it in /Apps_Data folder) - you'll be using its big brother SQL Server. But that's not a problem as the basic plan comes with 1 free SQL DB! (How cool is that?!)

Basically, follow these steps:

1. Create a new database using the GoDaddy control panel. Because you are sharing the database server with other databases, you'll only be allowed use a name that doesn't already exist. This should explain why you can't call it ASPNETDB - someone else has probably snapped that one up.

2. If you need to install the ASP.Net Security Schema - there's an option on the "Create Database" GoDaddy configuration page. Check the option when you're creating the database and all the tables and stored procedures will be installed in the database.

That's about it. Good luck.

Tip 2: Email settings

To setup email on BlogEngine.NET on Godaddy, configure the email settings as follows:

The SMTP relay server is relay-hosting.secureserver.net


If you're using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit you may notice that when you load the page a control that you wish to be hidden is visible and then disappears (most frequently observed when people try to use CollapsiblePanel and expect it to be collapsed initially or have a PopupControl that should be hidden until a user clicks something). This occurs because of the delay between when the page first renders and when the JavaScript is run to modify it. In order to avoid this problem altogether, we recommend you have all of the controls positioned and styled as you would expect them to look after the script has initialized them.

For example, with CollapsiblePanel you should set its Height="0px" (or whatever your CollapsedSize property is – in this case 0) and add set it to not overflow using style="overflow: hidden;". If you have a PopupControl you should set it's visibility to false using style="visibility: false;". Do not use the ASP.NET property Visible="false" because this will prevent your control from rendering on the client.

About this blog

This is the code related blog of Paul Lim. I will try to post codes that I use daily for my work. Hopefully, it may help you out someday... :)


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