GoDaddy Reviews
GoDaddy : GoDaddy Reviews : Worthless for any kind of site that actually gets traffic
Mar 15, 2009 by Greg (Hidden)
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to this review here Got sucked in by GoDaddy with low-priced domain and hosting offers. For a while, it was okay because I really just needed a few static pages up and I didn't have much traffic. For that, it was the lowest price I could find and it sufficed.
However, eventually I put up a site driven by Joomla, and traffic increased around the same time. On average, I had about two dozen users online during the daytime and evening hours, and GoDaddy's servers seemed incapable of handling even this small load. Page load times creeped up to 20 and 30 seconds, if the pages loaded at all. Tier 1 phone support was able to log on and verify the problem existed, but when they escalated it to the engineers I always got a reply back 24 hours later that they could see no issues. They blamed bad coding, despite the fact that Joomla is provided for installation on their hosting accounts within their own control panel. Meanwhile, I subscribed to a server monitoring service that checked twenty times an hour - my site failed to load 3% of the time (and the service only reported a failure if it could be confirmed by multiple geographically diverse testing sites).
I moved the site to Hostgator after getting annoyed at being jerked around. The exact same site has had 100% uptime with Hostgator, and the average page load time is less than one-sixth of what it was at GoDaddy.
I don't know if it's the hosting servers or the database servers that are overloaded (and yes, they're separate), but it's very clear that GoDaddy has an overcrowding issue on its shared servers. Avoid them if you use Joomla or any other database-driven CMS, even if your traffic is on the low side. If their low costs have already drawn you in, be prepared to babysit.