Dan Johnston DOT Net Digital Development, CMS and other musings

Kentico + fasthosts = Don’t bother

I have been a fasthosts customer for some time now, but only recently decided to use them for hosting. Having become quite add-apt at using Kentico CMS over the past few years, I thought it would be a great idea to register some (shared) Windows Server ASP.Net space attached to this domain and start a little website of my own. If you are reading this with any intention of doing something similar, my advice is simply not to bother. I would rather not document the whole sorry affair, but my early attempts to deploy Kentico via ftp met with a simple '500 server error' despite having carefully followed the instructions in the Kentico documentation concerning shared hosting and medium trust environments. Attempts to diagnose the problem myself using the server logs were unsuccessful.

Having signed up for a 'special price' two year contract with Fasthosts (oops) I threw them an email along the lines of "Hey, what gives? Does Kentico work on here or not?" to which I did receive a prompt response (during a weekend to give them due credit) that they would pass on my message to a member of the support team.

The first attempt, by the weary support person that eventually responded, was to 'fix' the problem by simply removing everything form Kentico's configuration file. There, now the error no longer said '500 server error' it said something else. Job done.

I emailed back to say that; while removing everything from Kentico's configuration file had got the original error message to not appear on my web-site, it didn't in fact get me any closer to my original goal of installing Kentico on my Fasthosts web space, as in fact it would certainly not work now. I eventually received another response (from yet another support chap) who decided to remove the handlers and modules section from the configuration file. This, in fact, got the web installer working and (after several painful episodes of removing the database and adding it again via the fasthosts dashboard) I managed to get as far as the CMSDesk, Kentico's administration front-end.

Unfortunately, due to not having the modules and handlers in the configuration file, the desk threw all kinds of errors and was virtually unusable.

I can understand Fasthost's security configuration, and very possibly had I pestered the support staff enough they may have relinquished some configuration that allowed the system to run correctly, but in all honestly I have had enough. There are other options (such as storm  in the UK) out there at a similar price with dedicated Kentico support, in fact I emailed Storm and the sales chap there said they would happily allow me to install Kentico 6 with full trust.

I have, however, used Fasthost's very competent dashboard to change my hosting to Linux instead, and switched to good old WordPress for this blog. Perhaps one day they will add Kentico to the very impressive application deployment system they incorporate into the dashboard.