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

Update 12/27: Despite my admonitions about using Godaddy hosting, my clients are still using it, so I have had to deal with it several more times.  (Somebody up there is punishing me for my snarky comments!)  The latest bit is that they have some fancy Ajax stuff in their admin interface that is oh, so pretty.  But it’s slow, and it has lots of annoying scrollbars, so without scrolling, you may not easily find whatever thing you’re looking for.

For awhile the File Manager part of admin wouldn’t work at all in Firefox – Doh!!!!  But they seemed to have fixed that – it’s still incredibly slow, but now at least I don’t have to fire up lame IE to do my work.  They still like to open links in separate windows, which is quite annoying, especially in some cases where the new window is now sitting UNDER the one whose link you clicked, so you don’t realize it’s there for awhile!  F+!  But I just convinced a Godummy user to move to Liquid Web, so that’s an A+ success, and I don’t even get any commission for doing that!

To a small degree, I sympathize with their plight(!).  Having been a corporate slave myself, I know that when something is built the wrong way in the first place, and lots of people use it, making any change to it is like turning the Titanic around.  All it takes is some bonehead initial design, and everyone will be suffering with it for a very long time.

Godaddy has spent megabucks to get Danica Patrick as their spokesperson.  No doubt their marketing department thought that this would give them an image of sexiness and speed.  They have neither.  I think Danica would bolt if she saw just how clumsily Godaddy actually works.  A classic case of having sizzle and no steak.  I have now begun calling them Godummy, and it has caught on with a couple of my clients!   

Also, my latest update has elicited a comment from Site5 management!  I had briefly mentioned them in a comment, and I’ll just recap here.  A couple years ago, I was hosting several sites there, including my own.  After months of smooth sailing, I noticed that my site was starting to hang, so I asked Site5 support to take a look.  They said that the server was overloaded, and they stopped a process that was causing the outage.  Great.  But then my site began to hang very regularly.  I was looking for work at the time, and not one, but two employers in one week told me that they could not get to my site to see my resume, so bye bye.  You can imagine how angry I was about that.

Through some geeky sleuthing, I managed to figure out that a very big real estate site was on the same server as mine – it looked like the smoking gun to me.  I told tech support about this site, and asked to be moved to another server.  Many host are willing to do this.  Not them.  They just did the same thing they did the first time.  Stopped some process, and emailed me back that it was now working fine.  At that point, I decided to dump them.

It is possible that Site5 is better now with the new management.  But having had a very bad experience, and despite their kind offer below, it’s not that likely that I’d consider them again.   Moving one site to another host is one thing.  Moving a lot of them is a major operation, so it’s a big decision.  Losing a customer is easy.  Regaining them is very hard.  And IMHO, it’s too bad that going public on the web is the only way to get attention.  Just think of the poor schlubs who only get service from banks or airlines if they post a video of their plight on Youtube.

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!

UPDATE 7/18/08: I was contacted by Godaddy about this article, and asked for details about how they could improve.  Imagine that, little old me!  I said, well, you asked, so here goes, and I let them have it chapter and verse.  I didn’t hear back from the person, so I don’t know if it had any effect.  And then this week another Godaddy person emailed with the same question.  Evidently they have staff trolling Google for negative blog posts, and they’re not all talking to each other.  I noticed that for certain search words, this article comes up on the first page of Google results!

Yet another update, 10/14/09: despite my admonitions, I’ve worked on a couple more Godaddy sites since this article was first written.  I must admit that the database response on the sites is better than it was before, almost trouble-free, whereas I had experienced 3-minute page loads previously.  The admin interface is still very, very cluttered, but it’s a little better than it was.  So maybe blogs like this are having some effect!  I would still not recommend buying their hosting years in advance as many innocent people do, unless they have a good cancellation policy.

I’m not really sanguine about them making significant changes despite these inquiries, and here’s why:

• If they make each site more robust, that will be money out of their pocket. IMO, they (and many other hosts, like Site5) are overselling their servers.  In English, this means that they put a very large number of sites on one server computer, and this only works if most sites do not use all their allocated resources.  Sometimes all it takes is one or two sites hogging resources to bring down all the other sites on the machine.  Incidentally, overselling is common, possibly even ubiquitous, but it can work, as long as it is managed well; some websites on a server do truly use fewer resources than others.  But if there are simply too many on each machine, and it’s not carefully watched, then you have Super Slowness and downtime, or worse.
• The admin interface won’t change, because they are trying to sell more stuff. This only matters to the web developer, of course.  But their admin pages are extremely cluttered with additional features that they’re trying to sell you after you’ve entered a contract, so many that it takes awhile to figure out where you’re trying to go.  Upsell ‘em, baby!