After going three rounds with GoDaddy over the permissions for dasBlog, I am throwing in the towel. It turns out that the .NET Security Policy for my server has completely disabled file read/write access via the CLR. This causes a small problem for dasBlog since it is an XML file-based blogging engine. I politely and very specifically described the problem and requested that this be corrected. However, they refuse to modify the .NET Security Policy. In addition, they won't set permissions for the ASPNET user account to have read/write access to the specific folders for my site.

They maintain that it is against their policy to customize permissions on a shared server. I find this odd considering that Todd Miranda's Blog is also hosted by GoDaddy using dasBlog and it works just fine. However, I am running ASP.NET 2.0 on my site, but Todd is still running ASP.NET 1.1. This could be part of the problem. (And, yes...I have dasBlog configured correctly for 2.0)

GoDaddy recommended that I use their Custom Directory Permission utility to grant any necessary privileges for my application. However, this utility is used to grant read/write access for anonymous users. I don't really want to give everyone on the web permission to write to my blog directory. In any case, I won't be converting over to dasBlog in the immediate future. I am debating on whether I want to upgrade to a Virtual Dedicated Server or try a different blogger that uses SQL Server for a data store...or worse yet, write my own (like I have the time).

Despite this incident, I still recommend GoDaddy as a hosting provider. I haven't found anyone that can compete with the amount of space/bandwidth they offer at a very reasonable price. As long as you can tolerate customer service that insists on reading from their Standard Question Response Card, it really isn't that bad.

Within the next few days, I will be starting a series of posts about Test Driven Development. This is something that is buzzing in the development community lately and I have really started to develop an interest in it.