For a few years, I've been using Godaddy as my primery hosting for all my online projects. During the few last weeks a friend of mine offered me a monitoring service for free he's developing for commercial use and I decided to add few domains of my for tracking the performance of my sites.
The monitoring service he provides is basic monitor for ICMP, TCP, HTTP: HEAD, GET and POST methods. For my projects I made a simple GET test for 5 of my domains, again, everything worked great I didn't suspect a thing I've only joined the service since it was offered for me as a trial for free.
Well, at first I was shocked as my phone was flooded with SMS alraming a possible downtime, when I got to the keyboard everything seemed to be fine. After a close investigation of logs and hours on hours of time spent I found that 10% of my visitors got a 404 error message saying "No Input File Specified."
After sending Godaddy's Support all my findings I got a canned following response:
The information you provided is not sufficient enough to reproduce any error that you are facing. Please specify the issue clearly in your email that where you are getting the duplicate, and also please send the specific URL and error message. We understand your concern and we will definitely try to resolve the problem as soon as we can.
Thanks for understanding, and if you need anything else, we are happy to help you with
Sincerely,
Cullen P.
Online Support Technician
Well, It took a tech-sevvy person like me to pin-point this issue at about 10 hours. Of course it takes some time to repreduce.
With absolutly no control over the situation, disapointed with the irresponsible support response I decided to move on, drop Godaddy's shared linux hosting and moved almost all my sites to a different shared linux hosting.
This very site is hosted with Godaddy and constantly monitored for this errors and they're about 10% as before, daily.
No Input File Specified, Fast/CGI, Apache and PHP5
Running PHP as CGI (Fast/CGI) has become the industry standard, for it's security for the performance and customizability in shared hostings.
When running PHP with Fast/CGI and Apache2 you might get "No Input File Specified." error, usually when the request is to a nonexistent PHP script.
The reason for this happening that any request to Apache requiring PHP script to be loaded directly headed off to the CGI wrapper without the existance verification that such a file exists and accessable.
I suspect it happens more with hosts with unstable NFS setups which should provide more redundancy but infact cause weird undetectable errors.