I’ve recently been poking around on a Q&A site, and stumbled upon a question about GoDaddy hosting. Since I’ve had some experience here, I answered. The answer was so long and detailed, I thought I’d save it for posterity here.
I’ve had good and bad experiences with GoDaddy hosting. My clients choose their own webhosts. I’ve probably worked with about a dozen clients on GoDaddy (shared) hosting. I work primarily in LAMP development, so the following comments apply only to the Linux servers.
The pros:
- Their control panel tools are fantastic. You have 30 days of snapshots of your entire site if you need to roll back a filesystem, and it’s easy to pick and choose selections from an old snapshot to update. Very comprehensive.
- The telephone support is 24-7 and it’s not just some guy reading a script. Most of the support guys I’ve talked to are pretty good, stateside folks who will really help you find a solution if they can. I’ve had a few disappointments in the past, but they’ve really stepped it up recently.
- their new GridServer shared hosting, while still shared, is load-balanced for a better response time.
- If you have domains with them, the DNS manager and connecting to the hosting is super painless.
- They are inexpensive for what you get.
The cons:
- Support and sales are the same thing. Sometimes it feels like the support solution is to sell you something else.
- The older “legacy” shared servers are slow as molasses.
- There is some kind of disconnect on some of the sites I admin with the database. The filesystem comes up likety split, but any mySQL queries hang, sometimes up to 20-30 seconds.
Overall, they are in my top 5. As far as security goes, it’s hit or miss. With any shared server, you are only as secure as the guy with the password “password”, but GoDaddy seems to have some protocols in place for that that many discount hosts don’t (proper chrooting, etc.)
Other hosts I’ve worked with and liked:
- Deep Discount: BlueHost, JustHost, HostGator — don’t expect a lot of support here, just basic hosting at a redonkulously low price
- Moderate/Small business: Rackspace, MediaTemple — A little more for your money, although we did have a nasty rash on one of the MT shared servers earlier this year. Shared == vaunerable in any situation. If you can pony up for a VPS or a “Slice”, it provides superior performance and security (for a price) RS, GD & MT all offer VPSes.
Tags: hosting, performance
I’m in a similar position where I only recommend hosting to my clients. I always tell them the same thing: it would be dishonest of me to recommend a product that I won’t use. I want my website to work, so I don’t use oversold shared hosting. If you can find a shared host that does a decent job with resource management, go for it. Otherwise, get a VPS or pool with 2 or 3 other people and share a VPS. I pretty much exclusively use MT & RS and love them both.
No host is perfect. I’ve had more trouble with MT than with RS but MT has never once let a problem hang for very long. As soon as I’ve alerted them to a problem, they’re on it lickity-split and get it fixed.