Recently the worlds largest economy web host, GoDaddy, launched their version of Managed WordPress Hosting, a concept we pioneered at Pagely. Their new service is cheaply priced and according to GoDaddy’s support docs they blacklist a handful of WordPress plugins.
We make our Managed WordPress accounts as secure as possible. To help achieve that, we blacklist a number of plugins known to cause security issues. This list uses the name of the folder the plugin creates when you install it. You can view this directory by connecting to your Managed WordPress account via sFTP
If you have been comparison shopping for Managed WordPress Hosting you may have run across another competitor of ours that also publicly posts a list of plugins they “disallow”.
The two lists are identical which leads me to believe that the GD engineering team did not actually research or vet their listed plugins but simply played copy-pasta from someone else. Since they did not validate the list themselves, I think it would be fair to say they really have no idea why they are banning a particular plugin.
Here is a little more insight: I noticed a plugin on both lists called hcs.php which happens to not exist in the .org repo or could be found on google, but is the exact name we gave one of our internal mu-plugins that was used to manage Pagely sites early in 2010: hcs stands for “Hosted Client Service” which is the white label name some of our Reseller system ran under at the time. I got a good laugh after the one competitor added it to their banned a list a couple years ago, twas a small display of gamesmanship between rival offerings.
However for the life of me I cannot decipher why GoDaddy’s brand new managed hosting service would ban a plugin that has not been used in over 3 years and likely only a handful of copies ever left our servers when a customer migrated out. Their engineers that in theory should have supplied said list after researching and vetting each plugin were asleep on the job, or really bad at it, or both.
Sigh.
Wow, that’s pretty pitiful. However did you catch that?
As one of the lucky authors to have his name on the disallowed list, what is your take on the whole banning of plugins?
Josh,
I think you may be the one that isn’t doing research. If you did an actual comparison and bought and setup something on this product offering you would understand there are significantly more painful experience problems than what plugins are being blocked or not blocked. I would list them all for you, but it would just propagate you continuing to be lazy.
—
Derek
I feel ya Derek, I know jack shit about the problems associated with launching a hosting product and on boarding folks to WordPress/said product.
Love ya buddy.
Strbel what funny here is to see Wp-engine snapshot plugin…. Seriously why someone will use Wp Engine snapshot plugin on Godaddy managed hosting… Such a shame !
Godaddy dose other things without backing them with reasons, Here is the last year discovery about their hosting, sites hosted on Godaddy are actually not reachable through the whole world wide web!
http://wp.me/p2GnoT-5H
They blacklisted most of the useful WordPress plugins. Why not they put this message on their hosting plans ” WordPress is not welcome”.
It is hard to believe that any experienced site builder would even consider hosting with GD. I have had sites using WP CMS with them about 7 or 8 years ago. In fact they were not bad 10 years ago. Now, with the possible exception of hosts owned by EIG, GD is an awful experience. All IMO of course.
Still I can’t believe this! Thank God. I never choose Godaddy!!!
This is a really shocking news!
I find it hilarious that they are blocking caching plugins that would only reduce the load on their servers.
Interesting. How do they filter that? Wouldnt it be enough to rename the plugins folder and maybe change the plugins name in the plugins files?
Cheers
Really shit move by Godaddy, was working on a client website today and found this situation and found that not much could be done from my side.
Well… if you have to use MediaTemple/GoDaddy hosting, you might want to try this in plugin:
/*
Plugin Name: Unban Goddady Plugins
Description: Allowed plugins banned by GoDaddy to be used on your site
*/
if ( !class_exists( 'unban_godaddy_plugins' ) ):
class unban_godaddy_plugins {
public function __construct(){
// try to remove the action that prevents plugin activation
remove_all_actions( 'activate_plugin', ~PHP_INT_MAX );
}
}
new unban_godaddy_plugins();
endif;
The
GD_System_Plugin_Blacklist()constructor setsadd_action( 'activate_plugin', array( $this, 'disable_activation' ), ~PHP_INT_MAX, 2 );from an mu-plugin, which runs before the normal plugins are loaded, so this this removes it (especially since it has a unique priority value).Or even better:
add_filter( 'pre_site_transient_gd_system_blacklist', function(){
return array( array( 'name'=>'godaddy', 'minVersion'=>0, 'maxVersion'=>1 ) );
} );