GoDaddy: The company was once one of my preferred online destinations whenever I needed a domain name, but has quickly devolved into a pile of AOL-like feces; the stench of which is so detestable that a single whiff can cause instant blindness and fits of uncontrollable rage. Why, you ask, has GoDaddy gone from being an effective supplier of domain names to an issue of dread? Their hosted platforms.
Since moving into more of a development and programming role with my employer, I’ve been given the keys to the company’s tertiary web server. As you may have already surmised, this tertiary web server is hosted by GoDaddy. When I’m not pulling my hair out due to their ridiculously complicated back-asswards back-end “tools”, I get to struggle with the everyday basics like getting a website to load properly without a boat-load of HTTP 500 errors.
Today’s happy little challenge came in the form of semi-functional MIME types. I have been working on some software for the company in the form of a .NET application which is installed via a ClickOnce site hosted on the GoDaddy server. For 95% of people who have installed the application via the server, there hasn’t been a problem. However, the other 5% have all had the luxury of having IE6 (yes … the bane of everything “web”) open an XML file instead of installing an application. This seems to happen regardless of whether these people have all the pre-requisites installed or not. So why were these 5% (which included three of my direct superiors) not able to install the software properly? Good question.
MIME Types
At the end of the day, the answer has to do with what extensions GoDaddy has added to its list of MIME Types. A MIME Type is essentially a media type that has origins older than almost every website on the web. In my case, GoDaddy wasn’t reporting the proper MIME Types for the three files that I needed; .application, .deploy, and .manifest. To solve the problem quickly, I opened up the .htaccess file in the root of the installation path and added these three lines:
AddType application/x-ms-application .application
AddType application/x-ms-manifest .manifest
AddType application/octet-stream .deploy
Problem solved.
Users who are stuck with IE6 (thanks, IT) need to clear their cache before trying again, but they’ll have no trouble installing the application from that point.
The piss-off about this situation is that these three file types are listed in GoDaddy’s own MIME Type list, which is why the ClickOnce installation worked for 95% of everyone that needed to install the application. However, for those lucky 5% of users, they were not seeing these three important lines.
Do you use GoDaddy for anything but domain registration? Do you have any problems with their servers? I’d love to know if it’s my problem or theirs.