Trunkful.com <cf_gems>: GoDaddy Discontinues ColdFusion Hosting

GoDaddy Discontinues ColdFusion Hosting

Sep 1

posted by Wil Genovese in ColdFusion | 19 Comments

The news hitting the "Twitterverse" as I type this short blog post is that GoDaddy has just sent out emails to their ColdFusion hosting customers informing them that GoDaddy is going to discontinue ColdFusion hosting in 3 months.

"After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue support for ColdFusion®. The product will officially remain available to Go Daddy customers for three months, until November 29, 2011. After that date, ColdFusion websites hosted by Go Daddy will not work.
We will not be removing customer content from the system -- your files will remain safely in our hosting datacenter. Because your current hosting account offers additional languages (PHP on Linux and Windows plans, and .NET on Windows plans), we hope you will find an alternative to your current ColdFusion implementation. Additionally, Deluxe and Ultimate plans offer Ruby, Perl and Python as language options.
Should you decide to move your files, please review the following help articles: Moving Directories Using the FTP File Manager and Using the File Manager to Move Files Between Directories.
If you have further questions or concerns, contact our customer service department at 480-505-8877.
Thanks for being a Go Daddy customer.
Bob Parsons
CEO and Founder
GoDaddy.com

No matter what your or my opinion(s) are of GoDaddy and their ColdFusion hosting business, the facts are people need to move to a new host fast.

There are other ColdFusion Hosting companies. Adobe has a page listing their ColdFusion Hosting Partners. These are the ones I know of off hand.

While working with CF Webtools, I have the opportunity to work with Edgeweb hosting a lot. These guys are awesome. They support, and I mean SUPPORT, their clients. I do recommend Edgeweb based on my experience with them.

Also, if you are looking for high quality ColdFusion programming and hosting I will shamelessly plug Mark Kruger, a.k.a. ColdFusion Muse, and his team at CF Webtools, which includes me. ;-)

this was an unsolicited message

Update: I removed one company due to the number of complaints I've heard.

This entry was posted on September 1, 2011 at 2:09 PM and has received 3596 views. There are currently 19 comments. Print this entry.

Related Blog Entries

My Secret Life as a CF Webtools Developer (February 8, 2011)
Understanding ColdFusion Web Hosting (June 13, 2009)

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#1 by Scott Bennett on 9/1/11 - 2:57 PM

Yeah, I got my dear john letter today, and just went to the blogosphere to see if it was true and not just a scam. I guess I'll have to move a couple small apps I have on their servers.
I'm certainly not going to take their suggestion to re-program them in some other language.
#2 by Andrew Tulley on 9/1/11 - 3:40 PM

It shouldn't come as a surprise. It's a very, very expensive language to support in both licensing costs and the premium paid to niche development houses to maintain legacy code. And really, anyone still investing development dollars into a ColdFusion project should have their heads examined. With the other languages mentioned in the letter (PHP, .NET, Ruby, etc), which are effectively free, there's just no point. I jumped ship several years ago and haven't looked back.
#3 by Wilgeno on 9/1/11 - 3:54 PM

@Andrew - too bad you don't seem to know much about ColdFusion and the costs of developing applications. When you jumped ship did you decided to get into a dingy? Programmers are the most expensive part of the application. ColdFusion allows programmers to code more, faster thus saving money over the long run. PHP is free, but programmers are not. I have a life, a house, a car, I need to get paid. So you can find some poor slub in a hut that can slap together PHP for $10/hour. You get what you pay for. If you want continuous support and your company relies on it's website being online, do you really want the lowest bidder and no support?

What does not surprise me is that GoDaddy, whom IMHO really never supported ColdFusion, is dropping ColdFusion.
#4 by Scott Bennett on 9/1/11 - 4:32 PM

Yeah their CF hosting was very limited. I just put a few tiny apps that didn't really do much beyond use cfinclude for headers and footers, and connect to a small datasource for a couple things. I could probably convert them to php or something without too much trouble. I would never have hosted a more robust app on Godaddy... in fact, I don't think I would use Godaddy to host any robust app, regardless of which language I programmed it in. It is great for hosting dinky personal sites for $5/month but that's about it. Their service and support is just not good enough for any kind of a large app in my experience. but it would be nice if they would at least support it with blue dragon or something if the server cost doesn't work for them.
#5 by Adam Tuttle on 9/2/11 - 6:05 AM

GoDaddy has the worst domain control panel and service I've ever worked with. They are doing their CF customers a favor. Good riddance!
#6 by skay@media3.net on 9/2/11 - 8:59 AM

REMOVED !!!

Media3, if you want to advertise on my blog you should ask permission to do so first.
#7 by Travis Makarowski on 9/2/11 - 9:09 AM

I'm not surprised. I called them a couple months ago looking for a cf host. At the time they only offered cf7 (according to the dude on the phone), this was 2 months ago... CF8 is already old news and they were offering me cf7.

For you guys that want to stay with godaddy you can rent a virtual or dedicated server and install Railo or BD.

KickAssVPS.com also had reasonable rates and seem to really dig the CF devs, I think they host a cfug?
#8 by Hostek on 9/2/11 - 10:38 AM

Hostek.com is offering 3 months of free ColdFusion or Railo hosting for GoDaddy customers for you to get to know Hostek.com. Hostek.com provides CF9 hosting on both Windows and Linux platforms as well as Railo on Windows and Linux. Hostek is an Adobe Solutions Provider and also the very first host to achieve Railo Hosting Partner certification. We are committed to the ColdFusion developer community. Our hosting is setup on an advanced cloud hosting infrastructure and we provide quick and quality assistance 24/7.

Promo code: GODADDYCF

---------------------
This ad had been approved by Wil. Click my affiliate link http://hostek.com/aff.php?aff=630&plat=CF
#9 by Wilgeno on 9/2/11 - 11:31 AM

@Travis - KickAssVPS is local to me here in St. Paul, MN. The local CFUG is the TwinCities CFUG and is the only one in the TwinCities. The all powerful Jason Dean, http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2193-At-cf-Objective-..., is currently the man in charge of the CFUG. I'm a semi-regular member and occasional presenter. As far as I know, KickAssVPS has nothing to do with our CFUG and has never hosted, sponsored a meeting.
#10 by Travis Makarowski on 9/2/11 - 11:58 AM

@Wilgeno - Thanks. I was just going by what Mr. man said on the phone. Apologies if it was incorrect. Either way they do seem excited about ColdFusion.

I'm fortunate to have my sites hosted for free through a family business but I'm stuck on CF8, that's why I was looking.
#11 by Nate Johnson on 9/2/11 - 12:02 PM

I was surprised and disappointed that GD dropped the CF offerings, but I'm with you guys - I personally never used it for much of anything and I highly suggest (as an ex-employee of GD's, I have a LOT of personal experience in this arena) to look elsewhere for hosting anyway. Still, my disappointment stemmed from CF getting another 'blow' to it's market prominence for what I consider to be the best server-side scripting language available now from both a RAD perspective (Rapid Application Development, aka "save money on your programmer expenses"!!) as well as a functional perspective. I've seldom if ever found much that I can't easily accomplish with CF in my applications, and the handful of those cases were pretty easy to handle with a custom tag, plugin or web service. CF rules, and I wish that more hosting companies would be more prominent with pushing it as a competitive option. Sadly, the business world just looks at startup 'costs' and doesn't generally realize how much they've lost until they're already knee-deep in ASP.Net, PHP, Java (umm - CF, man! It's Java done better!), etc.
#12 by Nate Johnson on 9/2/11 - 12:09 PM

Oh yeah - I also recently did a comparative analysis on CF versus ASP.Net for a large, enterprise application...and basically (in this case) came to the conclusion that an Apache/CF server ends up running SLIGHTLY (and I mean like within ~5%) more expensive to start up from scratch than a Windows/ASP.Net with all things considered, and with a mix of new and experienced developers, the programming work in ASP.Net was forecasted to run at about 13 times (1300%) more than CF to accomplish the exact same application. Think about that - 13x MORE for the SAME result. That's what the "oh, this comes FREE with your WINDOWS LICENSE" attitude buys you! As a part-time web programming contractor (and full-time employee), I've had a pretty alarmingly high rate of companies bailing out of a project part way in due to the cost of development after a month or two when doing ASP.Net, but I've barely had any issues with companies focused on a CF-based solution, because they come together so much faster and ultimately get more bang for the buck.
#13 by Wilgeno on 9/2/11 - 12:12 PM

@Nate - Thank you for the information. There have been many reports by people that have done the same types of cost/benefit analysis and most have come to the same realization.
#14 by IzB on 9/2/11 - 7:23 PM

I'll like to know where there may be some good sources for this data so I can show my company.
#15 by Matthew Williams on 9/5/11 - 8:01 PM

For the love of all the is holy, I would steer clear of the remnants of that which WAS hostmysite.com. Hosting.com, sucks, IMHO. In fact, I've gained several clients that were former HMS customers that couldn't put up with hosting.com any longer.
#16 by Jason on 9/6/11 - 10:35 AM

Give CFDynamics.com a try - awesome support - great plans. I've been told they will be coming out with new pricing and other hosting plans soon as well - can't wait!
#17 by Jason on 9/6/11 - 10:36 AM

That would be http://www.cfdynamics.com.
#18 by Melissa on 9/14/11 - 9:23 AM

I use Hostek for my personal sites and sites for freelance clients with limited budgets; they're inexpensive and their support has always been speedy. At work we have almost 100 domains with hosting.com and very rarely have any issues (and their support quickly takes care of any we do.)
#19 by Alex on 9/24/11 - 11:55 AM

Hello --
any suggest about valid CF Hosting in Europe?