Whew – sorry for the technical title on this one.

I was struggling to enable MultiByte [mbstring] support on my site (GoDaddy virtual Linux hosting) for a little side project, and was running into issues with the then-installed PHP 4.2. I found that it only worked when I upgraded my PHP version to 5.

The upgrade was pretty painless – the only thing I had to do was rename my PHP.INI file to PHP5.INI.

Hope this helps anyone running into similar issues…

Well, somehow, I think my GoDaddy account has been updated or moved, because I didn’t do anything special (no patches), and this site is now pretty much flying. As I reported a couple of weeks ago, I had isolated some speed issues to the fact that I was on a GoDaddy hosted account with ~3500 other domains.

As one of my friends pointed out, this is not a high-traffic site, so I doubt GoDaddy took a personal  interest in me, or my front-page complaining. It might have just been regularly scheduled server maintenance. Of course, it also could be that no one is actually using their accounts right now, at 5:30ish on a Sunday morning.

Anyway, I hope this keeps up.

Aha! I think I’ve finally figured out why my site is so slow, even after all the tweaking I’ve done: it’s my host, Godaddy.

It looks like my domain shares its IP address with 3569 other sites. Yikes.

I’m thinking about switching to another host like Dreamhost or HostGator.