I’m frustrated.  I just spent nearly half a day setting up a site for a client to get ready to “go live” soon.  Setting up the site on their already existing, shared hosting account with 1&1 Hosting was part of the final round of things to make sure we were good to go.

Here’s the situation.  The client has two domains hosted on this account (1&1 promises you can have as many as you want).  The new site I’m putting up will replace one of the existing sites when the client is ready to pull the trigger.  So my approach was to set up the site in a new directory and create a “dev”.theirdomain.com sub-domain to point to it.  This is pretty standard practice and it allows me to check the site on the server it will eventually live on instead of just throwing code at an unfamiliar server and crossing my fingers.

So I used their handy-dandy control panel to create the sub-domain and point it to the new directory.  Then I pushed all of the files to the new directory via FTP.  All of the *.shtml files worked, but any time I tried to call a *.aspx file I would get a 404 error.  Odd… I know they’re there…  So I spent an hour or so poking around their control panel looking for something I may have missed.  Oh, there’s a way to create an “application” out of a directory but you can only have 5 of them.  Surely that’s it.  Nope.

So, defeated, I caved and decided my last heroic productive act of the day would be to call their tech support.  After a short wait, I get “Jean” (pronounced like Shohn) on the phone.

Me:  Hey Jean, I’m trying to get a sub-domain set up so I can run some .NET files.  Everything seems to be working, I can access any of the .shtml files but none of the .aspx files work.  I get a 404 error!

Jean:  You need to make redirect scripts on your main domain.

Me:  Well… that would take down the pages on the main domain and I really don’t want the client’s live site to go offline.

Jean:  (le sigh) It will work, you need to create redirect scripts on the main domain.

Me:  I understand that creating redirect scripts will work to forward traffic to this new site.  But are you telling me that for every aspx page I have on the new site I have to create a redirect on the old site to forward it over?

Jean:  Yes

Me:  That can’t be right.  Maybe I misstated my original question.  Let me try again.  I have created a sub-domain and pointed it to a directory at the same level as the other site.  Everything is running on it just fine, except for any page that is a .aspx page.  All .aspx pages give a 404 error whenever I try to access them, which isn’t good because the default page is… well… Default.aspx.

Jean:  (aggressively) You should create redirect scripts on your main domain.

Me:  Yeah thanks, bye. *click*

Seriously guys.  Your tech support sucks.  I’m going to try again tomorrow, but if the answer truly is that you are unable to enable .NET for sub-domains then your hosting service sucks too.