I’ve been struggling with my Site5 Web hosting account for two years. In many respects, it has been great — good service at a price I was willing to pay. However, my biggest single aggravation has been that there is a primary domain name associated with the hosting account, and that primary domain could not be hosted in a subdirectory of the account cleanly. URL rewriting in an .htaccess file had been my workaround for a long time, but it never really did everything I wanted — and it was complicated.
The hosting account was up for renewal today. I had a decision to make: keep the account and the hassle, keep the account and find a solution to the hassle, or back up my data and move on.
I’m happy to say that I’m keeping the account and it appears that all of the frustration regarding the subdirectory has been eliminated.
The CEO of Site5 helped me out, after seeing my complaints on Twitter. He suggested that I request changing the primary domain to a dummy, nonexistent domain name. With that done, I could then create a domain pointer for my former primary domain (this one, actually), linking it to a subfolder of my account’s public_html directory.
I made the support request, which was fulfilled promptly. The change was made and it works.
Now, it looks like some issues I’d been having have cleared up. Namely, the Global Redirect module I use in Drupal correctly redirects from URLs like /node/300 to their human-friendly paths.