29FIVE Designs recently upgraded all of our hosting to GoDaddy’s new 4GH cluster hosting. We immediately noticed a significant performance improvement in all our sites due to the cluster style web hosting. However, all of our PHP URL masks achieved via Apache’s mod_rewrite in htaccess broke. After about four days of support calls with GoDaddy and being told numerous different stories, it was finally confirmed to us that URL masking for PHP files is not globally enabled on the 4GH servers (although HTML masking is). This is a change from their “legacy” hosting which had masking for both HTML and PHP enabled globally.

As GoDaddy does not provide scripting support, we were left with attempting to configure our htaccess files such that they would actually work with the 4GH hosting. We were finally able to find the proper configuration and would like to share our findings with anyone who may be experiencing the same issue:


Options FollowSymLinks
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php