Solving a Complex Middleware Collision in Kentico SaaS

In my recent work with Kentico Xperience on a SaaS portal, I encountered a tricky issue that prevented the creation of new website channels. Despite numerous attempts to troubleshoot the problem myself, I could not get the admin console to load properly, and I kept receiving the message: “No website channel is running on this domain.”

 

After reaching out to Kentico support, their team dove into the issue. At first, they found no clear answers from the error logs. My local deployment was working perfectly fine, yet the SaaS environment failed to cooperate.

 

What made this issue even more puzzling was that my front-end website loaded without errors, but the admin console refused to display anything. This misalignment between the environments raised questions about middleware collisions or deeper system-level conflicts.

 

Kentico’s support team ran through an extensive debugging process. At one point, they even reviewed the entire source code, comparing it line by line. Finally, they identified the culprit: the order of middleware registrations in my Program.cs file.

 

In particular, there was a middleware conflict between app.UseKenticoCloud() and app.UseKentico(). The app.UseKentico() call was registered too early, which led to collisions that blocked the creation of new channels in the admin portal.

 

The fix was surprisingly simple but easily overlooked: changing the order of middleware registration. By moving the app.UseKentico() call to follow app.UseKenticoCloud(), I was able to resolve the issue. Kentico support also flagged a minor database inconsistency, advising me to ensure that the database is updated before deploying any new packages in the future.

 

After applying the recommended changes, I deployed a fresh package to the SaaS environment, and everything worked smoothly. This solution saved me a great deal of time and frustration, and I owe thanks to the Kentico support team for their thorough investigation and excellent communication throughout the process.

 

If you’re working with Kentico SaaS and run into mysterious issues, don’t forget to check your middleware registration order—it could save you some headaches!