Godaddy Web Hosting: Cheapest and Most Advertised Isn’t Always Good

When you’re choosing a company to host your website, there are an enormous number of choices. With so many companies offering hosting, it’s tempting to choose the cheapest.

As a web developer, I frequently work on sites where the client has already chosen hosting. I’m seeing a negative trend, and that is the number of people hosting with GoDaddy. They advertise so heavily that it may be the only hosting company that some people have ever heard of. They get you by offering rock-bottom prices, slick sales pitches, and many features.

There’s just one problem with that - if your site has any complexity at all, be prepared for your site to run very, very slowly. For instance, I was just working on a site that offers various types of searches - certainly a very typical feature. While testing the search, the site would take upwards of 5 minutes for a single page to load. Unbelievably bad, and sometimes the page would freeze indefinitely, causing me to just give up. Imagine your customers - they’d probably never come back.

I contacted GoDaddy tech support. I’ll say one thing - they do respond quickly, and in a friendly manner. Their response: that the site had database calls, and that if I rewrite the application to not use these, then it will run faster. In English this means: “You’re the problem, not us, so sorry, we can’t do anything”. Never mind that the client had already purchased some software that runs great on many sites (including on my test machines), and that it would take, oh, maybe five months to rewrite the entire application. And keep in mind that I was the only person on the site testing it. Imagine the abysmal speed if even 100 people were trying to use it at once.

So I strongly recommended that the client change hosting. They were reluctant, as they had gotten a super-cheap several-year deal. Again, cheapness rules most decisions. But faced with the prospect of users being completely unable to use his site, he finally agreed, and he changed hosting. Now the same program runs around ten times faster.

Another problem with hosting-challenged Godaddy is their extremely confusing admin interface, which makes web development very difficult. Why would this matter to you? If you’ve hired somebody like me to develop your site, it makes my job much harder, and this means getting your site working will take much longer, and time is money!

This is actually the second Godaddy site I’ve recently worked on - the previous one was almost as big a mess.

So if you’re considering using GoDaddy as the host for your site, think hard. Really hard. If your site is no more complex than pictures of your cat, or maybe just your resume, Godaddy can probably handle it. If you still insist on using Godaddy, maybe their more expensive plans work better, but I couldn’t say. One thing’s for sure - they are very aggressive on sales, and they’ll try hard to upsell you. You’ve been warned - good luck!

http://davidchu.net/wblog/?p=55