How to Solve Godaddy Managed wp hosting update errors – January 2017 Problems

by | Jan 13, 2017 | Client Tips

Having problems and errors spit out in WordPress running on Godaddy Managed WordPress Hosting?

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First, let me say that Godaddy has made some major improvements improving their reputation and the results they provide WordPress sites over the last three years. They have made it easier to run nightly backups, build and stage test sites and more. They have cleaned out the cess pool of upsell, cross sell promotional garbage that years ago made it impossible to navigate their site without stumbling into an accidental buy of a service that you probably did not want, need nor intend to buy.

They are SOOOO much better today than they were.

This week I have witnessed them run into some problems. I cannot tell if these problems will be something easily solved or not. Based on how much money, time and effort they have put into great people, company mergers, programming and marketing clean up, I can’t imagine they will let these problems persist too long.
I have witnessed through multiple clients running on their Managed WordPress Hosting solution, issues running updates. This covers

  • WordPress core updates, which godaddy is supposed to handle through Managed WordPress Hosting
  • Theme updates (responsibility of the site owner)
  • Plugin updates (also responsibility of the site owner)
  • services that might help manage these updates for you like ManageWP which Godaddy recently purchased or even WordPress.com’s plugin update manager (free)
  • The updates just aren’t working reliably on Godaddy if they are managed, or done in the WordPress admin Dashboard>Updates area.

It’s real easy for many people to see the failed to update error message.
More annoying is the creation of the Maintenance file ( .maintenance) in the root of the WordPress install, which stops the updates currently and requires a user to login through sftp and delete the file. Then try again!
I have witnessed these problems get worse with several clients over the last 4 months. One of those clients now needs to move to a different host all together as the update problems seems to be linked to Godaddy’s own cache process. (this can be disabled by renaming the object-cache file in the WordPress installation, but I’m not recommending that.
Manual updates (loading things via sftp) does seem to work, but that sets us back to doing things the way they were done 10 years ago in WordPress.  You can also work through Git too, but for a small site that is not run by a developer that’s going to be as tedious as SFTP.
Curious if you too have run into these problems and or if you learned additional work arounds from them, gleemed some insider knowledge from Godaddy Hosting support (overworked this week and not easy to get on the phone. My own support calls were rerouted to Sales and support, which just wasn’t prepared to answer questions relating to the current problems.  Nice people, lack both the full training and the systems access to get things done.)

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