Why GoDaddy didn’t work out for me
When I first started out in web development, I didn’t know anything about web hosting. All I knew was that I needed a domain name, and a ‘server’ to host that domain. I started on Yahoo’s Geocities (hello 2008!) and only knew that when you uploaded an .html file, a webpage would appear. When Geocities closed at the end of 2009, I was forced to look into a new hosting provider. Knowing nothing, this is where GoDaddy came in.
I paid $67 USD for the first year, here was the rough breakdown:
- $48 – Economy Hosting
- $5 – Certified Domain
- $5 – Business Registration
- $7 – Private Registration Services
- $2 – Domain Name
Certified domain was/is useless and the business registration I never used. The private registration in theory seems like a nice idea to protect my information.. But can cause legality issues if ever there is a dispute. Sadly, I didn’t understand this, and have been paying for all of those services for the past 5 years. I also ended up increasing my hosting to the Deluxe package (doubling the cost) as I wanted to host multiple domains.
The hosting initially served its purpose and I started to install multiple WordPress sites. Unfortunately, that is when all my websites slowed down. I created an incident report within a week of upgrading and complained about how slow the service was.
They answered back with a generic response about how I can use GZIP, minifying files, image compression, disabling FasterCGI and this:
Because you are in a shared environment, there will be times when the traffic to your server will be high and performance issues may persist. This is typical for websites across all providers of shared hosting in an environment such as yours. As we work to improve our environment, here are some tips that you can use to improve your website’s optimization for page load speed […]
I can’t remember if I found there to be an improvement, but I definitely had been experiencing major latency issues for the better part of two years. However, due to my ignorance of server maintenance, I simply assumed it was my ISP acting up.
That being said, GoDaddy’s phone service has always been good. Additionally, they call you yearly to see if you are satisfied with their service. Usually when they call, my latency issues are far from my thoughts, so I have had no complaints.
After 3 years of using GoDaddy’s slow hosting, I finally decided to make the switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server), specifically DigitalOcean. If I could, I would transfer my domains to DigitalOcean, however they don’t offer that service. Ultimately, I don’t mind GoDaddy’s interface, and the price of the domains aren’t that bad, so I am going to leave all of my domains there. All that is left is to point the DNS to the appropriate server.
