Installing Umbraco 7.3.5+ on GoDaddy

GoDaddy shared hosting is an affordable option for most. But then you do hit a few snags which make it difficult to deploy Umbraco to GoDaddy.

I've deployed a few sites using Umbraco to GoDaddy and given below are some steps I followed to make it work.

To start with, I usually create a staging website from the Plesk panel and upload the files after publishing them to the file system.

For the very first upload, I make sure that the following web.config entries/values are maintained:

  • The connectionString for umbracoDbDSN is empty
    <add connectionstring="" name="umbracoDbDSN" />
  • The appSettingsKey for umbracoConfigurationStatus is empty
    <add key="umbracoConfigurationStatus" value=""/>
  • The customErrors mode should be set to Off
    <customerrors mode="Off" />
  • Trust Level should be set to True. Add the following entry under <system.web> node
    <system.web>  
      <trust level="Full"/>
    

Installation Step 3/5 Permission settings are not ready

Use the following support article to set up Modify permissions for Plesk IIS Worker Process Identity Account for all the folders listed as not accessible
http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/6481/setting-directory-permissions-with-windows-hosting-accounts

Change permissions for the following folders for the user Application pool group (IWPG\_customer-name). Make sure they have Full Control permissions.

  • Config
  • bin
  • media (if not available, create this folder)
  • web.config
  • Views
  • CSS

Create the following folders if not available

  • Partials (within the Views folder)
  • MacroPartials (within the Views folder)

Don't forget to change the custom errors mode back to On once you have set up your website and tested that everything is working fine.

That's it! Now you should be able to have a great CMS-driven website at an affordable cost.

P.S. This article has been sitting in draft mode for so long that it's Umbraco 7.5.4 when I publish it. But the same principles do apply.


This article was originally written on Google's Blogger platform and ported to Hashnode on 17 Sep 2022.