Everything Great is *Nixbased

It amazes me the amount of people who still use Godaddy as their shared hosting provider. They never were a great host, they have always oversold and had lackluster customer service but lately things have been getting even worse. I have had and currently have several clients on Godaddy’s shared hosting service and each and every one of them have had problems, now I know the odd problem is to be expected with any host but lately these problems have been more frequent.

As part of my service for my customers I am often the one to call Godaddy’s “tech support” on their behalf to notify them of a problem or to find out what is going on with that problem. My experience with the tech support has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. From claiming they have no experience with phpMyAdmin (a simple test question I posed after getting the distinct feeling that the person on the other end of the line was inexperienced and not qualified to be in a tech support roll at any company) to telling me “They are working on the problem, if I knew what it was I’d be back there helping”, these people are under qualified and ignorant, all that is needed in such a position is to have a little tech knowledge, speak clearly and be polite which seems beyond them in my experience. The willingness to help also depends on which representative you get, something as simple as importing a database which is too large to import via phpMyAdmin (due to their own settings) can be painless with one person but denied by another. The first person may tell you to upload the dump via FTP and call back where as the person you speak with when you call back may tell you that they are not allowed or are unable to do it. It is just plain old horrible tech support and lack of uniform training as well as policy….but Godaddy does get points for not outsourcing that department to India.

The plans are also not competitive on the shared hosting front when you compare them to Host Gator or Surpass Hosting. They offer somewhat similar pricing to Surpass although only allow one site to be hosted, limited space and bandwidth as well as lack of shell access etc. It really isn’t a great deal which is odd considering their size.

I did at one point have a Godaddy Virtual Dedicated Server running CentOS, to put it bluntly, it was WAY over sold and memory is not as advertised, even when the server was using much less than the amount guaranteed (256MB guaranteed, 1 GB bursted) running a backup would tell me it failed due to lack of free memory available. This issue was reported, noted as a problem but never resolved as at the end of my 12 months of service during final backups the issue persisted. The default hosting control panel is also rather clunky and uses illogical placement of links and such but going on about that could probably do my head in all on its own. The bottom line is: AVOID GODADDY HOSTING.

I used to host everything on my own home servers but I have since grown the sites too large to continue to do so. Due to said growth I have moved pretty much everything over to SurpassHosting which gives rather great package deals if you sign up with them on a long term basis. So far the Surpass tech support has been much better than Godaddy’s although not perfect, they at least attempt to help and explain themselves well. I have yet to see any downtime and the speed of the service seems adequate. This is quality hosting at economical cost. To be fair I have heard horror stories about pretty much every host whom has become large enough to be worth talking about so I can only speak from personal experience but I do know Surpass was highly recommended to me (it was 1st recommended I use them in 2004 but had no reason to at the time), where as Godaddy is not often recommended by anyone whom knows what they are talking about. In my personal opinion, if you want domains Godaddy is a fine choice, if you want hosting choose a company like Surpass Hosing instead.