Until October 2009, I was a GoDaddy Partner / Wild West Domains Reseller, and although I made some money by selling their hundreds and thousands of unneeded services, I had a very hard time pushing a product which I myself had serious doubts about.
Over the 3 years that I’ve been selling Wild West or GoDaddy Services, I tried many different hosts, and I recommended GoDaddy hosting to many small businesses, because for a website that doesn’t really drive traffic, GoDaddy pricing really isn’t all that bad. However, I’ve never been too convinced about their hosting services and some of the functionality that comes along with it and today, I will give you the inside story, based purely on experience, as to why you should not use GoDaddy for hosting a website if you plan to build a reputable website.
So why haven’t I been comfortable selling GoDaddy Hosting? Well, put simply, because it just sucks. It fails terribly when it comes to speed, reliability and user friendliness, and if you ever have to depend on their customer service, well, you may have to ask Jesus to intervene, because GoDaddy or Wild West Domains Customer service is really, really lost. So lost, in fact, that they do need a Messiah for enlightenment.
Hosting with GoDaddy? Better Make Time…
Let’s put it this way: access to the GoDaddy Hosting Panel was so slow that at times I could brew a cup of good old Spiced Indian Tea before the page would load. It’s one thing to have the front end run slow, but to log in, create email addresses, or use their file manager, or create databases with their custom interface was the most painful experience I have ever had as a web designer. In addition, if you ever had to log on to the customized phpMyAdmin interface to access the MySQL Databases, well, you’d have to go make some more tea. Run time between queries with phpMyAdmin is very slow, and it makes for an over all pathetic experience as a webmaster.
Now, when you’re running the front end, it’s just as bad. I switched to several different packages as a reseller: from VPS Hosting to Semi Dedicated to Economy to Deluxe. They all run at stone-age speeds, and the front end experience is so bad, especially if you’re querying a database, that the website may occasionally time out. That’s bad news for those of us who wanted to do testing on the server, because oh my, we wasted some mighty precious time. In any case, it made for a bad user experience, especially if you’re running an ecommerce site, as no user wants to wait 3 minutes for the next window to load. AJAX could act as saving grace, but the minute your AJAX application would query your sever, well, you’re at GoDaddy’s mercy; and let me tell you, they really are running their hosting service like they’re in the Wild Wild West.
One of the reasons the database access is so painfully slow is that it sits behind an SSL connection. This is a rather silly move, as most successful hosts don’t employ it simply because it can drastically slow down the performance, of, say, a massive wordpress blog that could be pulling along the lines of 70 queries a page.
70 MySQL Queries, you say?
With GoDaddy, they claim to be able to monitor the simultaneous number of connections to the MySQL Database and the simultaneous number of active visitors (whatever in the hell that means) on the website. Now, GoDaddy staff isn’t clear on this, but apparently, if you have more than 50 consecutive MySQL Connectinos or 50 active users, well, you’re fucked. You’ll get a 503 site temporarily down error, and it can last for over an hour, because apparently, you have 50 active users who are consecutively glued to the MySQL Database. How awesome is that? And yet, neither google analytics or extreme tracking could detect more than 1500 pageviews in a day @ that point. But these daddy goners had their own agenda. According to some of the intellects at Wild West customer support, the number of open MySQL DB connections or the number of consecutive visitors would change based on which package you had, where as some claimed to have no knowledge of any such thing. But nobody really knew what triggered this 503 error. Apparently, as it turns out, all the staff needs maintenance.
FTP Access, you say?
This one really pissed me off. No more than 2 simultaneous FTP connections, and no FTP connections lasts more than a 120 seconds. So, if you’re testing on the server, you’re fucked! And if you’re hosting multiple sites on the account, you’re penetrated twice because more than one webmaster can’t upload files to the FTP server. That’s just bad; really, really bad.
Email?
Well, the folks over at GoDaddy may have developed their own email interface, but they still don’t have control over spam. Either that, or they’ve got too much. While I was at Wild West, I had several clients complain about their clients complain about how their emails would net get delivered, and the folks over in Scottsdale, Arizona really had it out for everyone. At times they’ll block hotmail email, even if originates from a valid SPF policy domain, and if you ever emailed them, they were just about as useful as, well, useless. Besides, if you didn’t pay extra money, you only got 10 MB per email inbox! Hello! Free email comes with 2 GB now. I know you guys are from the same state as McCain, but please keep up with what’s happening!!
Installing Applications
If you’re buying a third party software like an eCommerce Solution or blog etc., please let the party you’re buying from know you’re using GoDaddy, Wild West or Secure Server services, because for so called ‘security’ reasons, their settings are all screwed up. For instance, with several ecommerce providers, you’ll have to point to a specific URL to be able to use the curl() function in php with GoDaddy & Co., and it can be very frustrating if you’re new to this stuff and don’t know that your host is the one that’s been screwing you over for hours while you kept thinking your code was all screwed up.
Worst of all things with GoDaddy is the overall experience if you are a professional. Just like Sage has mesmerized the UK with it’s marketing and taken over as the defacto accounting software despite being the worst accounting package on the market, GoDaddy with Wild West has marketed itself extremely well, with thousands of affiliates, to the point where they can easily trap the newbie consumer with absolutely low quality service. Well, I’ll be having no more ofana part to play in that crime.
If you’re a starter, go with GoDaddy. If you want good, reliable hosting that works, go for cluster based hosting, and please don’t go with Servage. I’ve already cussed them out on this website a couple of years ago. I have finally settled with IMountain.com Solar powered Hosting, and they’re not paying me to write this, which is why there’s no link to them in this post. I’ve been using iMountain for a few months now, and I can tell you that I’ve been pleased with their speed, FTP, customer service, etc. etc. They’re not about giving you fancy marketing stuff or spending too much time writing their own cluttered interface. They’re using respected software in the hosting industry to run their service, and it comes with great speed. It’s not the cheapest hosting you’ll find, but it is definitely worth the money.
In about 4 months, I’ve only had downtime for a couple of hours one day, and this is the day it took a couple of hours for me to get a response out of them. But as it turns out, the problem was that someone had a launched a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on one of the servers, and they were busy trying to counter it. For those of you who’re not familiar with DDoS, it’s somewhat equivalent in cyberspace to what Israel is currently doing to Palestine; you can hardly blame them for fighting the terrorist off before responding, eh?
But that’s IMountain.com. With GoDaddy and Wild West Domains, I’ve never been able to figure out why I got a 503 error three times a week!
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