Creative Compulsion

I have been hosting with Clook.us for about a year now and quite honestly love them! I’ve never seen customer support like they have - 2-5 minute response time and always helpful. Recently, though, I made the (difficult) decision to switch hosts. It’s purely a bandwidth thing. On one of my eBay ids I sell digital products, mainly templates that are in huge zip files. The sales on that id are picking up a lot this month (a good thing) but my bandwidth limit on my host is 10 gig and I’ve already used 25 gig this month (not such a good thing). Soooo, I started shopping. Needed more space and a host that would let me have multiple domains as I have 4 now and a 5th to be added soon with a 6th following hopefully not too far behind. (I know, I’m becoming a domain whore).

After looking over lots of packages and browsing several different forums, I decided to go with Go Daddy. It seemed pretty logical - my domains are registered there and my SSL certificates were purchased there. I heard that CS isn’t the greatest, but I typically don’t need help outside of installing certificates and other basic things. I did read on one forum (from several people) that uptime was good and speed was ok. So, I switched one domain. Just to see. I went with their Deluxe plan which gives you 100GB of storage and 1000GB of bandwidth - more than enough for what I need. Everything went smooth and even though I’m used to CPanel, I found my way around the hosting interface easily.

Everything went so well I decided to transfer a second domain/site over. This one has an SSL certificate. Everything went smooth - site looks fine. Only thing left to do - transfer the SSL certificate. Now, I had emailed support prior to signing up for hosting to ask what the transfer process entailed. They told me once my hosting was set up, I could automatically transfer the certificate by just clicking the Transfer button under my certificate options. Even I could handle this right? Uh, not so much.

I log in to the certificate manager and there is no transfer button. I figure I’m just a moron and dumped cookies/cache, ya know, everything eBay or Wagglepop tells you to do when you have a problem. Nope, no transfer button. I email support thinking I must have missed a step somewhere or this will be an easy fix. Support emails back and tells me that my domain is NOT hosted with them (ummm, then why are the nameservers pointing to you and why is it in my hosting manager and WHY OH WHY am I able to access everything on the site unless its secured?). The nice CS person told me that since my hosting was not set up, I would need to contact hosting support. UGH!

I call hosting support. The CS rep looks at my account and thankfully very quickly narrowed down the problem. Now this is the part anyone considering Go Daddy as a host needs to pay attention to. First, you can only have ONE SSL certificate and ONE unique IP address per hosting account. Second, the domain with the certificate MUST be listed as the primary domain. Since I set up Creative Compulsion first (which does not have or need a certificate), I couldn’t transfer the other domain’s certificate. HOLY CRAP!

Maybe this is obvious to some people, but when I signed up for hosting I really thought I read through all that fine print. Evidently, I missed this somewhere. To be honest, since every other host I’ve used allows more than 1 cert per account it really never dawned on me that this could be an issue. The CS Rep said this may change in the future but for now multiple domains on one account does NOT mean multiple secure sites. I spent today swapping the two domains. Finally got it all done and whaddaya know? The transfer button automagically appeared as promised.

So maybe this will save someone else from making the same mistake I did in assuming what you could and couldn’t do with Go Daddy hosting. I’ve decided for the space, I’m still better off money-wise to create a second hosting account to place my other site on, but some people may not want that inconvenience. Live and learn!