We had a situation with our cPanel migration support team, very recently where we had to move a cPanel based hosting account to Godaddy. Move went successful. We had to setup the Free Hosting Account which Godaddy has given to the customer, FTP Transfer was done (I guess it was FXP) and we did made sure that all the files were transferred as well. But unfortunately a few links were giving us 404 File Not Found Error.

After a initial round of checking and re-assuring that all the files were indeed moved, we realized that it is a few htaccess mod_rewrite not working and which is causing the issues. We wondered what would have gone wrong and had to google. A few tips, like adding

Options +FollowSymlinks

Escaping the characters were seen and tried in .htaccess, but eventually it was the small directive modification seen below which fixed the issue.

I have added, before the directive “RewriteEngine On” and before any mod_rewrite rules.

Options -Multiviews

When Multiviews is on it will expand, a redirect like products/foo/bar to products.php/foo/bar but those won’t get expanded to the real wanted one like products.php?pid=foo&id=bar . Though not mandatory, another reason is products.php is already there and it is getting a block by another conflicting rule, RewriteCond -f.

For more, read out

http://support.godaddy.com/godaddy/apache-multiviews/

Wohoo. Thanks Google and Godaddy 🙂