im using godaddy's free hosting which officially supports php5 and mysqli
but every time i try mysqli_connect it tells me

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysqli_connect() in /home/content/y/s/h/yshaf13/html/bm/db_fns.php on line 5

i know i have all the paramaters set up correctly cause everything works fine when i use
mysql_connect.

I would start by running phpinfo() to verify that the server does indeed support PHP 5. It sounds like it doesn't.

I find the wording on free hosting offerings to be confusing and sometimes misleading. Also, many free hosting offers have limited or restricted functionality. I couldn't find any info on the GoDaddy site about free hosting.