WordPress, GoDaddy, Permalinks, and 404’s

I assumed turning on permalinks in WordPress 2.1 would be as easy as selecting the radio button and clicking update. Little did I know I would be looking at 404 pages for 2 hours. After extensive research I came to the conclusion that there isn’t any known solution to this problem. I have read many posts that say different things. Having lost all hope of fixing this error I decided to close my browser window and start all over. I opened my browser again, went to www.joshstauffer.com, clicked on ‘About‘, and viola!… Permalinks now work! Why? I don’t know.

Solution: If you would like to use permalinks and you are using GoDaddy for hosting, all you must do is turn permalinks on and wait. I am not sure how long to wait but rest assured the permalinks will begin to work after a short period of time.

April 26, 2007 | Filed Under Tech

 

Comments

38 Responses to “WordPress, GoDaddy, Permalinks, and 404’s”

  1. Jacob Santos on May 20th, 2007 2:46 pm

    Wow. That is interesting problem. I wonder if it had to do with how they set up apache and mod_rewrite. Which it isn’t, it is a .htaccess file.

  2. Jeremia Froyland on May 20th, 2007 4:16 pm

    Had the same problem here. Turned on permalinks nothing worked for about an hour and then bam, they’re up and running. Also, I agree with what Jacob said, I believe that on GoDaddy’s end they just have some lag time with the server updating.

  3. Yarn on July 1st, 2007 2:43 pm

    Hello,
    i setup permalink and i’m waiting it.
    i hope it will work.

  4. Daniel on July 26th, 2007 4:47 pm

    I’m going to give a try. Damn Godaddy!!

  5. Niall Doherty &#187 Blog » Blog Archive » Building ndoherty.com (part 1) on July 31st, 2007 1:35 pm

    [...] The solution? Wait a while. [...]

  6. smaxor on August 14th, 2007 2:05 pm

    Thanks for the info turning it on myself as well. I’d assume that as we didn’t hear back from the people that said they did it’s going to work :D

  7. asdqweda on September 1st, 2007 10:06 pm

    Solution: If you would like to use permalinks and you are using GoDaddy for hosting, all you must do is turn permalinks on and wait. I am not sure how long to wait but rest assured the permalinks will begin to work after a short period of time.

    I tried it, you are right, just wait a little while, Economy Deluxe, doesn’t matter.

  8. Finally, I got my wordpress blog work - My Thoughts and My Life on September 20th, 2007 11:35 am

    [...] of the configuration is to make permalinks work. After a long time of struggle, I finally found this article on the net. The solution [...]

  9. NP on October 30th, 2007 1:19 pm

    New .htaccess files are only processed once per hour (however updates to existing .htaccess files should be immediate). You should only have to wait about sixty minutes if you didnt have a .htaccess file before, according to the GoDaddy FAQ on the subject.

  10. tanya on November 3rd, 2007 10:12 pm

    Yes, waited about 20-30 mins and now everything works! thanks

  11. Viviane on November 20th, 2007 2:05 pm

    Thanks for posting about this! I was already thinking I had to use ugly links. :)

  12. Jason Butler on January 12th, 2008 5:40 pm

    Hey Josh… I was in the same boat as you. After reading your article I waited and it worked!!! Thanks bunches!

  13. Tara on January 22nd, 2008 9:02 am

    The wait is the key - thanks!

  14. Douglas on February 13th, 2008 9:57 pm

    Another story of success! Thanks for the tip. JUST KEEP WAITING!

  15. alicia on February 17th, 2008 4:25 am

    THANK YOU!!! this has been befuddling me for quite some time - totally worked to wait.

  16. Sarah Lewis on March 11th, 2008 11:11 am

    Thanks so much for sharing this… you kept me from panicking! Sure enough, 10 or 15 minutes later, everything worked perfectly.

  17. Andrew Miller on April 19th, 2008 2:41 pm

    Thank you! I was at wit’s end with this. GoDaddy doesn’t make this easy.

  18. Jan on May 12th, 2008 10:41 am

    Cool post ;) . I am trying the same thing (on godaddy) because I am testing my own plug-in for WP… And I needed to change permalinks due to some minor bug in my plug-in (the Captcha-Godfather). it doesn’t work with permalinks which are different than default ones. Thus, I must wait and fix the bug…

    Thanks!

  19. Alen on July 2nd, 2008 3:29 am

    Thanks for the tip. I was just about to close my nice permalinks :(

  20. Alex on July 12th, 2008 1:30 pm

    Thank you for saving some hair on my balding head :)

  21. Stefan on July 14th, 2008 11:32 pm

    It works indeed! Thank you very much :) Damn lag, I never suspected I’d have to wait for <60 minutes and always gave up.

  22. `rolandinsh` on July 17th, 2008 3:01 pm

    I had the same problem, thaks to this post, I figured out that maybe that’s conected with DNS and it’s TTL. Ant It WAS, So to make it faster, go to Your DNS manager and change Your “A (Host)” and “CNAMES (Aliases)” www TTL value to 1/2 h. Then You’ll need to wait just 30 minutes :)

  23. Kerry on July 23rd, 2008 7:03 pm

    I can’t thank you enough… was starting to get SO irritated, found this post.. I waited about another 15 minutes (I had had been messing around for prob. half an hour), and tried it, and it worked, thank you!

  24. Paul on July 30th, 2008 12:40 pm

    Wow, I wouldn’t have had the patience to find this out. I had given up after a minute. I’m assuming this is some godaddy caching causing this problem.

  25. James on August 6th, 2008 9:41 pm

    I’m waiting now. I’m guessing it will work as well as it did for the others.

    thanks so much for posting.

  26. inspirationbit on September 8th, 2008 1:18 pm

    Thanks so much for this post. It kept me sane during that one hour of waiting. And just like you said, after one hour all WP permalinks started working without a glitch.

  27. CheYo on September 10th, 2008 5:13 am

    Thank you very much. I have saved me a sleepless night. Thank you. Off to bed. Ill check out my links later.

  28. Humanboy | Blog » Blog Archive » Welcome to the new Humanboy on September 23rd, 2008 3:16 pm

    [...] wait for godaddy to update their servers so the permalinks with wordpress will work. Assuming that this site is correct anyway. Right now, it’s just being redirected to a 404 page which is set to be my [...]

  29. rebellion on November 3rd, 2008 7:09 pm

    hell,, i worked,, i was about to loose my hope too!

  30. matt richmond on November 9th, 2008 1:04 am

    Hey, thanks for the post! I really appreciated it!

    I’m not sure if the time had been long enough, or if changing a DNS record under the “Total DNS Control Panel” kind of ‘kicked it in it’s head’ to refresh, but as soon as I altered one of the records, and saved it, the new permalink structure worked.

    … possibly coincidence, but I wanted to put it up here anyways.

    Thanks again!!

  31. Vex on November 9th, 2008 3:49 pm

    Thanks for this post mate! I was just about to delete wordpress and start all over again, thinking I messed up something in the config files. Saved me at least an hour of boring work.

  32. Bernard McClay on December 11th, 2008 3:26 am

    I was ready to download six different wordpress sites and transfer them all to Hostgator until I read this post. It saved me alot of work and aggrevation. Thanks for post. It was a lifesaver..

  33. Andrea on December 20th, 2008 12:40 pm

    After waiting for three days, I’ve given up. It isn’t working. It appears there are more complicated issues involved when a deluxe plan with shared hosting is involved. Their customer support is completely useless. Looks like it’s time to change hosting providers. :-/

  34. shashank on December 21st, 2008 4:45 pm

    Hi,
    I also read somewhere that the 404 page needs to be changed. Godaddy processes the 404 (page not found error page) before the htaccess has a chance to process it. I have changed the 404 page to my home page AND I am waiting!
    Spent 40 minutes already. Is there a better service provider than GoDaddy?
    Thanks for the tip!!

  35. Tim on January 13th, 2009 6:22 pm

    Thank you!! I thought i was going crazy lol Your no1 on Google now for this issue much appreciate this post!

  36. Ros Null | The Edge VA on January 26th, 2009 10:19 pm

    THANK YOU!! for posting this! By the time I read the comments and returned to my site the permalinks worked! Phew! I was nervous for a minute there!

  37. James Womack on February 3rd, 2009 2:23 am

    I’m waiting to see if this works ;)

  38. Chris Hoke on March 11th, 2009 11:06 pm

    Thanks for the post! Saved me some frustration.

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