GoDaddy is great for quite a few things, most of those are related to domain registration. For acquiring, transferring and managing domains GoDaddy is second to none.However, as for their Hosting, especially advanced web hosting, the buyer must beware.

Recently, a site (running Rails) that I help manage which sits on a GoDaddy shared hosting server went down mysteriously. Needless to say, since it had worked perfectly the night before there was some surprise. First level support was pretty ineffectual, which is fair. Five emails later, I was pointed to advanced support where I learned the following…

…a security patch was released from the Ruby on Rails organization labeled as “mandatory” as it contained a security hole allowing complete access to data, and therefore, data loss. We installed Rails 1.1.5 (and subsequently 1.1.6 on Thursday) across all of our servers in order to protect our customers’ data.

Unfortunately, this security patch breaks a feature that some Rails applications use called “Engines.” Your application is using such an engine that is incompatible with Rails 1.1.6.

Until an update to the engine is made, you may ‘freeze’ Rails 1.1.2 to your directory. However, you are at risk of data loss because of this security hole. Our apologies for the lack of notice on the upgrade. We felt that the security hole was a high enough risk to immediately upgrade to protect our customer’s data.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter…

On the surface this is great, GoDaddy is looking out for site security. The issue is that it took 6 emails to find out that this was the reason that my web application crashed. This is the sort of disclosure that should be made to users in advance so that they can prepare for the outage. Or, at the very least, sent out as an email after the fact if time is crucial (preferably both).

UPDATE — If your Rails Engines are broken as a result of an upgrade to 1.1.6, they have a patch released that should fix the problem.

tgreiser on 11 Aug 15:12:

John & Chuck:

Engines is up to speed on 1.1.6, just update against:

http://svn.rails-engines.org/engines/branche s/rb_1.1

[Image provided through Creative Commons by NoOtherOne of Flickr]

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