.NET 4.5 Websites Don’t Work on GoDaddy

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I ran into an issue on GoDaddy the other day and was surprised to find that I couldn’t run an MVC5 project using Bootstrap 3.0.  I got a “Page Failed to Load” error message (I think it was error 500).

I checked GoDaddy’s management page for an IIS version.  There was an option under IIS management to select .NET 2.0 or .NET 4.0/4.5 and .NET 4.0/4.5 was selected.  Why wasn’t it working if .NET 4.5 was selected?  It seemed that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the newest version of a website to work.  Was it the site itself?  It ran just fine in Debug mode on my laptop, but we all know how reliable that test is.  As a test, I published it to a local Windows 2008 R2 server and found it wouldn’t work there either.  I accessed the webpage from the 2008 server (locally) and received an error message that said I needed to have .NET 4.5 installed.  I checked the .NET version installed on my local server and sure enough it was only at .NET 4.0.  I ran the update (which actually installed .NET 4.5.1) and checked again.  Success!  My site looked, well I would say beautiful, but I’m not a designer so let’s just say it looked adequate.  I decided to rejoice at having published my new MVC5 web application except… that didn’t solve my original issue with IIS on GoDaddy (the site I was using to host my website).

I wondered if GoDaddy was somehow behind on updates like my 2008 server.  I looked everywhere for a button to force an update, but no such button existed on GoDaddy’s management pages.

I did some searching with my best friend Google and found several other bloggers with the same issue.  I’m sorry to say that as of 1/29/2014, I still haven’t solved this issue.  If you’ve found a work-around, let me know.  In the mean time, I rebuilt an old laptop into a Windows 2008 server and am hosting a personal site from it in my living room under the XBOX One.  The fan runs 100% of the time, but it works and it’s been surprising reliable.

I guess that’s Ok.  I’m saving myself $5.99 a month :-)

Capt. Rochefort – Riddick 4 was just announced!

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.