I am currently hosting a site through GoDaddy.  I have hosted a few sites there and I have been pleased.  However, my experience with running DNN on their (Shared) server is not impressive.

Because GoDaddy requires the site content to be in a separate folder (i.e. www.abc.com/dnn), I put the simple 1 second redirect on the index.html page.  The problem is that it takes several seconds up to 20 seconds to open the DNN page.  I finally spoke to someone that ran some checks.  The redirect is working as intended.  But, she says that there is a DNS Error on the default page.  The lady that I spoke to tells me that she bounced the site off of several servers to get the same type of delay - up to 30 seconds.  Once we get past the lag time, the site works just fine.  But I cannot have visitors staring at a redirect page half of a minute.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?  BTW, this is my first experience with DNN, so please be gentle!  I appreciate any assistance.

Thanks, Steve. I did intend to include that in the original post. The URL is www.slvfd.org/dnn. The woman told me only that it was a "DNS Error". It didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me either. I thought that a true DNS Error would result in the page not loading. But she said that something inside the coding of the DNN website is not resolving correctly.

If it helps, I am using a skin that I created in Artisteer 3. I would like to think that is not the problem. But now that I am thinking about it, I have had two issues with the skin. One being that the site had to be recreated following the upgrade from DNN 5.6 (I think) to 6.0. Another is that now the menus aren't working correctly on the new DNN. Thanks again for any help.

Norm,
I had a chance to look at this a bit. I don't see any references to external (or internal) files that are not resolving so I'm not sure where the "DNS Error" fits in from your support person. You can easily cehck for missing references using free tools in most browsers. I used Chrome's Developer Tools (Network Tab) to see all of the files, check for missing files (404s) and understand how long each file is taking to download.

What I did notice is that on the initial load the first call (/dnn) is taking over 5 seconds to load. Subsequent calls are all under 1 second.

As Costas pointed out this could very well be a "keep alive" issue for you "low traffic" site. IIS will unload the application from memory if it's not being used. There are a number of solutions to this (google DNN Keep Alive) some config and some service oriented. Typically however once youstart to see some regular traffic this won't be an issue.

PS - I'm a big fan of Artisteer. Been using them for a while now.

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Steven Webster
Manager, Community Platform
F5 Networks, DevCentral