Review Detail

I created my first Joomla web site back in April 2009. Since I was a total newbie, I relied on a friend's recommendation to go with the cheapest GoDaddy hosting plan. Set up and install was easy enough on GoDaddy, but my site was SLOW from the very beginning and only got worse over time. Then I started experiencing problems getting JoomlaPack to work with GoDaddy after working flawlessly for months. Their help desk was basically worthless. If there was a problem, their pat answer is everything looks fine on our end, it must be how your site is scripted. During the day, it would sometimes take 15 seconds for a page to load. DNS lookups were taking almost 4- 5 seconds because of their oversold shared hosting environment.

I was advised by a more experienced Joomla developer to move off GoDaddy as it would save me a lot of headaches in the long run. He recommended Rochen and Hostgator. Of the two, Hostgator was more affordable. I found a coupon for 20% off my order and a $50 rebate for Hostgator and made the switch. I even had Hostgator move both my sites (domains) for me. The first was free and the second domain only cost me $35 to move. With the $50 rebate, i actually made money on the move. All i had to do was re-point to the new DNS servers on Hostgator.

Within a few hours it was done and the increase in site performance was immediately noticeable. at least 5 - 7 times faster and no degradation in performance during the day.

CPanel is much easier to use than GoDaddy's control panel and I can do everything in half the time on HostGator. One bonus benefit? People can actually access my site from work. It seems like GoDaddy was blacklisted by my work firewall, so i could even check on my site during the day or respond to any type of emergency situation. With over 1400 sites sharing the same IP address on my GoDaddy account, one of them was bound to be blacklisted. I couldn't even get to GoDaddy control panel. That all disappeared when i moved to Hostgator.