My wasted weekend – GoDaddy WordPress WSOD

To all those wonderful wordpress users out there using GoDaddy hosting:

Why?!?!?!

This weekend I had such big plans – I was finally going to have the time to update my Drupal modules, work on a theme for ImpressCMS, go to the park with my kids. I had it all worked out. I just needed to spend an hour or so moving a recently finished site over to a clients hosting account with GoDaddy. Done it a few hundred times, thousands if you include all of the good hosts in the world. So, I really wasn’t expecting things to go too out of control.

Well, sucks to be me. WP WSOD to wreck the day. However, it really wasn’t a fault of WP – every other page worked fine. It was just the damn front page. Googling was useless, thousands of people have issues with GoDaddy every day – and the best answer you can get in the wordpress support forums is “try disabling your plugins…” and “disabling your plugins didn’t work, well I am stumped!”

Hopefully, any of you that have this same problem and are googling around will find this post. Because I am gonna make it real simple.

Here is how you can tell if this solution might work for you:
Does your site have a blank white page only on the home screen and look as if wordpress isn’t even trying to load?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then add this line to your htaccess file. right above #Begin WordPress
DirectoryIndex index.php

What really sucks, is that I gave a moments thought to this almost immediately upon seeing the white screen and fleetingly excluded it as a possibility thinking that no host would be so asinine as to omit index.php from the default DirectoryIndex setting. At least that is what I thought… TaDaaaa! GoDaddy proves me wrong with their super awesome shit boxes. Totally wrecked my entire weekend, but hopefully this post will save yours.