In a recent post about web host GoDaddy, Judi Knight echoes my thoughts, as well as my experience.
I don’t recommend anyone use GoDaddy for a WordPress site. This is due to very poor, erratic performance and then a tendency, on their part, to blame the customer and try to upsell you to something you don’t need.
If you are using GoDaddy to host your website, then you probably know that they had a huge outage last week where most of their sites and their e-mail accounts went down. It is now unclear whether the blackout was really caused by an anonymous hacker from the Anonymous hacking collective acting independently, since the Anonymous collective denied being involved.
Or, was it due, as is now thought to be the case, to problems caused by GoDaddy’s own infrastructure. Whichever the cause, many businesses lost time and sales by their sites being down and are now considering a move to a new hosting company.
With even a modest web site, many variables are in play – hardware, software, hosting outages, domain name problems, DNS problems, database glitches, etc. etc. This often makes it difficult to pinpoint the cause of a problem. When you’re an average Joe with a web site it can be impossible.
My recommendation against GoDaddy is based on experience and suspicion – not verifiable data. Without being inside the company I couldn’t truly see what was going on in the instances I had to contact them on behalf of a client. But I can tell you that I examined every possible point of failure that I, or the clients, had access to. In every case GoDaddy was courteous but denied that the issue could have originated on their end. Also, in every case, the problems vanished soon after calls to technical support.
With all of the better options available, there’s no good reason to choose a hosting company that may leave you hanging because they’re unwilling to look at internal failures. I wouldn’t refuse to work on a GoDaddy-hosted site, but if you do host with them and are about to do a redesign it’ll provide a cost-effective opportunity to make a clean break. Let me know if I can help.