Go Daddy Review

I reccomened Go Daddy to anyone who is serious about making a Joomla site.

Had a client with a year paid hosting so I used it for a new Joomla installation. Couldn't use my favorite extension (Mighty Extentions) because of no ioncube php loader. Site feels slow and less responsive than my reseller plan elsewhere. Company is great for domain names but I'm not a fan of the hosting for Joomla.

I hosted many sites on a GoDaddy virtual dedicated server for years, and was always happy with the service. Price and Plesk were good, but there is no Joomla support. VDS is also not ready for Joomla without server configuration changes.

Here's why they lost me. GoDaddy was no longer going to support the base server version and needed to reprovision my account on a new machine. Every other host I've been on, moved the sites to the new host and flipped the IP during a maintenance window. GoDaddy want me to back-up and manually restore each site myself, or buy a second package and roll over the account credit when I'm done. Not acceptable service.

These problems do not happen with their shared plans, but if I'm going to move to a shared plan it will be with another company.

Cheap but not by much, I bought 3 hosting plans for 3 years, they are not going to refund my money. I also purchased domain names for those. They gave me lame excuses, consider I'm an 18 years experience IT manager.

Please save your money and get something reliable as siteground, rochen or even alphaone-tech.com which have them proved to be as 3-4 times faster than godaddy joomla hosting.

I couldn't believe how slow and painfull the access time was.

Trust me, get something else, I realized for plain html pages, 1998 style, or frontpage amateur sites is ok. but not for CMS content, and do not even dream to get decent performance if you are going to use sql databases.

I cant believe all these positive reviews! They must be from people who havnt been with them long, or who are purely lucky because my experience with them was absolute misery.

I still rated them fairly because its really not a bad deal, you get what you pay for in with godaddy. You get all the flashy displays, spoonfeedings you want, and an easy way to get your site online (assuming it stays online).

Outside of the cosmetics, you really dont get a good uptime. I say that because while your site may be online, you can barely access it due to them overselling the crap out of their accounts. I did a reverse DNS and saw they had about 800+ other sites installed on my IP which explained why it was so slow during peak times.

The next thing is the support. I will give them credit and say that they have excellent phone support, even if the reason your calling them is bad. For instance, in my case - I called to complain about the speed, and while they were quick to blame it on the network and other uncontrollable conditions, they were extremely nice over the phone. I guess this has its merits.

The next thing is their ability to run Joomla. Well back when I was with them the first time it was almost impossible to install Joomla - since they they started the Hosting Matropolis thing which is basically a spiced up Fantastico you can find on 99% of the Linux hosts out there. Even with that I still wouldnt recommend someone hosting with them.

Final thoughts: Pay that extra $5 a month or whatever it is to find a dependable host who has a little more focus on the quality of service, that is the ability to actually serve a website, not only the customers needs.

GoDaddy is great for the person starting out, and you can't beat the prices. I've never had any problems with them at all, though I do find all the millions of adverts everywhere, the the constant pressure to buy more from them, kind of annoying. But otherwise, no problems. I run my professional JOOMLA website on it, as it's a very simple website with no bells and whistles...just the basics...and that kind of site can be run at GoDaddy no problem. I've run it at GoDaddy for 4 years now, and it's always up and always working

The control panel used to be hard to use, but recently they've tried to improve it a little with some new software and set up...it's a shame they've not switched to C-panel though. But, if you're not in and out of your control panel a lot then it's fine.

For my more complicated sites, though, I had to use a different hosting company, as GoDaddy can't really support the complicated JOOMLA site very well yet, and control panel they do use is a bit convoluted and hard to navigate, so for sites where I do need to access those things a lot I found GoDaddy wasn't the best.

I've hosted four sites with GoDaddy in the past 7 years. They are excellent for the beginner. Price is a steal. Service is excellent. BUT... when I needed to add more features to my site... GoDaddy just wasn't there. They already get my money so why bother. So I move one of my websites to BlueHost.... one click installs and MUCH MUCH FASTER paging.... BlueHost has all the blood/guts that I could hope far.... GoDaddy has all the hipe.

Love ya GoDaddy, but you got to go!

GoDaddy is excellent in many respects. The only issue regarding a Joomla site is that their MySql database is not localhost meaning the database is on a separate server. I have setup identical Joomla sites at GoDaddy, LunarPages and BlueHost and the GoDaddy site is much slower to load pages. Another person I work with did a similar thing to test his Joomla site and found the same result.