How GoDaddy forced me to upgrade to BlogEngine.NET 2.5

I have recently upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 2.5, it was fairly painless and the new version adds some nice features which I’m quite impressed with.

Of course I wanted to upgrade to 2.5 as soon as it was released but previous problems with my hosting provider (Go Daddy)’s upload process made that a lot harder than it should have been. Anything that was sent through ftp was corrupted, so I had to manually update each file by hand using their online tools… it was horrible! My hand was forced recently though, I was sent an email (quickly followed by a phone call) from go daddy to say that

We noticed that this account had been over utilizing the shared hosting resources. We have disabled the hosting account for the time being to alleviated the over utilized resources.

in order to re-enabled your hosting account, we request that you respond with the following:

1. A statement that you have reviewed and agree to abide by the terms of the “Web Site and Shared Hosting Service Agreement, “
2. A statement of what you will do to prevent this activity from happening again.

Well I wasn’t too happy to find that my account was disabled and I was pretty keen to get it all working again, but I had no idea what was causing the CPU to spike at around 90%. Unfortunately they wouldn’t provide me with any assistance, no logs or anything that might help me identify the cause.

I suggested that I upgrade to 2.5 as this would mean a fresh install, that way the problem could not exist in any of the files, just in case there was a memory leak or the account had been hacked and someone added some malicious code.To be honest that really wasn’t likely… but we agreed and so I had the ‘kick up the arse’ I needed.

The upgrade was pretty simple (follow the upgrade instructions), I downloaded the latest version from codeplex and extracted it and fired it up in Visual Studio. Then migrated my theme over and tried it out – almost right, it needed a bit of work, which I did (more on that in another post). The admin tools has integration with the BlogEngine.NET Gallery, so installing a new theme is really nice now; you can browse for something you like, select it and the theme is downloaded and set up for you. I made a few other changes to the local copy to see how it worked, then merged my web.config and tested it with real posts (fixed up the theme as I’ve already said). Next I backed up my hosted site and deleted all the files, ran the SQL upgrade script and uploaded the new version – I was actually surprised to see the site load first time. Hey after all this time I’ve come to expect I’ll make at least 1 big mistake with any code!

I moved some images back into the relevant folders (so if you notice any broken links on old posts please let me know and I’ll hunt them down, but everything should be there now). Made a few changes to the site through the admin tools and made a post. Amazing!

I like 2.5, it’s not vastly different to 2.0, which I was on before, but as always it gets better each time. The Gallery integration is a great feature and I quickly took the chance to fix up the theme I use on the site and it is now available for download through the gallery. So far there haven’t been any reports from Go Daddy that my site is causing the problems it was before.

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