Saying Good Bye to GoDaddy Hosting
by admin
After about a year of using their service, I’m glad to report that I am done using GoDaddy Hosting as the server space provider for my blog. Here is why.
I’ve been a GoDaddy customer for close to 10 years now ever since I bought my first domain name through them. I can’t complain about their domain names, because I’ve never had a problem with them, and I’ll continue to host my domains there. They’re a well known company, they run Superbowl ads (even if of the questionable content), they innovate and they’ve been in the business for a while now. They also offer comparatively low prices in the industry. This is I think where the catch is sometimes.
Buying products from Godaddy is kind of like shopping at Wal-mart. You may be paying less, but that usually comes at a price of quality.
That is true especially when it comes to their shared hosting product. In the past 6-8 months my blog have seen a fair share of either a complete downtime, or extremely slow load times. It got to a point when I would get an email a week from one of my blog readers telling me that they have a hard time accessing the pages.
There was once a time when I had a hard time accessing my blog at midnight on a Friday night. While I understand the servers may be busy during the week around US lunch time, but on a late Friday night?
I called their customer service several times, but every time I was told that the slow load times had nothing to do with their servers, but everything to do with the content of my blog that uses too many external objects (Flickr images, and embedded video here and there). They recommended I install some cache plugins.
I did, and, of course, that didn’t help. I even bought their virtual dedicated server, but that didn’t help either. I still had plenty of times when the blog was slow to respond.
Instead, I decided to leave them altogether, since they can’t solve my problems, and upon the recommendation of my friend Troy Holden (you may know him through Caliber SF project), I’ve switched the hosting for my blog to Laughing Squid. We’ll see how that goes, but so far my experience has been very good.
Transferring WordPress blogs to a new host has been an adventure in itself. I attempted to do it on my own, and I failed at very early steps. I know virtually nothing about MySQL, and I had no time to learn it. Instead, I asked WP Dude Neil Matthews to assist me. He’s been extremely helpful, and did it for a very reasonable price. Moving blogs was not a smooth process, because WordPress is not the simplest of platforms, but he saw it through to the end. If this is something you’re considering doing, but afraid to do it on your own, I highly recommend Neil.
So now that my blog is operating in a more normal mode, I’ll be writing more frequently. But for now, I sure am glad I’m no longer hosting my blogs with GoDaddy.