Does anyone have experience with GoDaddy & Website Tonight?

Hi. I am a newly minted freelance designer who is working on one of my first jobs. I redesigned a 12-page site and put it on my IPower space for testing. It looks and works great and the client seems very pleased. But I am having some issues now that I am ready to hand it over.

My client uses GoDaddy for domain & hosting. She uses a tool of theirs called Website Tonight to update. I foolishly assumed that at some point in the process I would be able to FTP my files over to the GoDaddy account (I have all the client’s account info) and she would still be able to use Website Tonight for updating. When I tried to FTP with Filezilla I was unable to. Ditto for the FTP tool on the GoDaddy site. When I wrote their support team I was told that this account is not able to use FTP; that the only way to update is through Website Tonight.

Does anyone have any experience working on GoDaddy sites? Is there a workaround for getting HTML & CSS files on their server? I refuse to believe that there is no way for me to move my stuff over to this account, but this is what the GoDaddy folks are essentially telling me.

Thanks in advance.

Mecha51

I have several hosting accounts on Godaddy. I use a test account www.cmysitepoint.info, www.americanlegionpost346.org, and I have a customer who has his domain names and accounts on godaddy: www.windowscapellc.com (I will be upload that site in 24 hours) and www.michilinicustombuilding.com

I have used several other hosting services and I find that Godaddy offers many more services. But what I like best, is that there is someone to answer the phone at any time of day, and I have never hung up without my problem being resolved.

I shy away from things like Website tonight, most other sites offer something similar. Unfortunately it is not real seo compatible, in my opinion.

My two cents worth.

I’m seeing some bad reviews on them as web host recently. They are believed good domain name registrar.

First off Godaddy hosting sucks…

I believe GoDaddy Website Tonight is a site building tool like myspace or geocities it is not a real website just a page builder type deal so to make new pages on it you have to use the “Website Tonight” application.

If you want to put up a real site (html/css that you build) you need regular host but your client won’t be able to update it using the Website Tonight program.

GoDaddy absolutly sucked for me when i had them for hosting. By far one of the worst. They are great for registering domains and all but hosting really lacks features that others offer for the same price. I would find a host that atleast offers cpanel as part of the package.

It may be true that GoDaddy doesn’t allow FTP access to sites assigned to accounts without hosting plans, which is likely a large number of the sites built with Website Tonight. After 20 minutes of searching through their Community Help Center I found several tutorials on how to set up an FTP client, but no information clarifying whether or not Website Tonight sites can be accessed or edited via FTP. I couldn’t find any information there about which plans allow FTP access.

You’d think there would at least be something (up-sell) directing users to upgrade or purchase a plan that allows FTP access, but I didn’t see one.

Well if they provide the service, and they say they can’t then surely it’s probably true. Why don’t you get a standard hosting account with them?

Hello,

Which hosting plan you have used on GoDaddy, and what is the problem is the site is only 12 pages?

Regards

Website Tonight is a good and powerful application for website. Try it.

:slight_smile:

Thanks for the replies.

The site is a really straightforward 12-page HTML/CSS job. I built the pages from scratch and in my past experience I’ve been able to just FTP the files over to the web server and build the directory structure myself. From what I understand Website Tonight is a strictly template-driven interface in that the user chooses one of several prebuilt templates, and what GoDaddy told me is that this is the only way my client’s account is able to edit sites.

As I see it my options are to try to get my client to upgrade their account to allow for FTP access (assuming GoDaddy allows this), get them to move to another host, or rebuild the site from scratch again using Website Tonight (I would really like to avoid this).

I guess my question is whether anyone with GoDaddy experience knows if the upgrade option is a viable one, or if once you build a Website Tonight site you are stuck using only that.

If your client wants to continue to update the site herself via Website Tonight you probably need to design it in website tonight. Godaddy does offer regular hosting. It would probably be cheaper than her Website Tonight account but it wouldn’t be the update method she is used to.

I suggest you spend a little time on Godaddy exploring their different plans. Then log into her account and see how it works.

I believe that you can find lots of information about godaddy as well as about their tolls. I believe they have own forum with more information about their tools and services

Just get your client to upgrade to a normal plan and then pay you small fees for any updates that need to be made.