A client of mine has a site hosted with GoDaddy because of their cheap prices and "serious support." What he's found is what I knew already: you get what you pay for when it comes to good hosting.
Just recently GoDaddy upgraded their security with a chroot environment for the web accounts. This is basically a "padded jail" that provides a way to try and keep user access tied only to one part of the file system, and is a decent precaution. For users, you might notice that when you FTP in to your site, no longer do you see the actual path to your folder, but rather the folder rests at the root (/).
(More info about chroot here from O'Reilly.)
To add the chroot, GoDaddy moved things in the filesystem around a little bit causing scripts that use absolute paths (like MovableType) to break.
It would be nice if GoDaddy would let users know about this in advance, but they didn't. In fact, their support personnel (second-handedly) belittled my client by claiming that the issue was due to something he had done and then, only after a second call, mentioned that they had enhanced their security which may have caused the issue. As a fix, they gave my client a new absolute path (starting with /var/chroot/) which was incorrect. Frustrated, the client called and we spent about an hour on the phone figuring out what was going on. That's an hour more than it should have taken if GoDaddy had its act together, in my opinion.
I suppose that's why I pay a little more for hosting; I get a warm body (whose name I know) who cares about how changes might affect me and my sites.
For those that happen upon this article looking to get their MovableType sites fixed back up, here's what you do:
- In your
mt.cfg file, if you are using the default Berkeley DB, use relative paths to your database:
DataSource ./db
- Within your MT Blog Config, set your Local Site Path to something like:
/home/content/u/s/e/username/html
- Similarly, set the Local Archive Path to:
/home/content/u/s/e/username/html/archive
- Rebuild.
Substitute in your real username, along with the first three letters as the preceding directory structure (username). If you have trouble, just look at the error message you get when you try and rebuild which will show you the path you need to use (up to the username).
I also found a thread on the MovableType support forum regarding this issue here. For its own sake, I hope GoDaddy can GoGet some training on how to treat customers.
After having a nice, white paperweight sitting in the closet for 5 months, it certainly didn't take us long to get the iBook back after the logic board replacement -- and it has worked flawless so far! We dropped the computer off at the Indianapolis Apple Store Friday afternoon and it was shipped to our front door by Tuesday -- yesterday -- morning. That's one full work day turnaround (did I mention it was free?) on an almost three-year old, out-of-warranty machine.