Have things turned around at GoDaddy? Or have things gotten worse elsewhere?

Probably a bit of both.

If you’ve followed this site for some time, you’ll know I’m not a GoDaddy hater. That said, I didn’t exactly recommend them either (especially not for hosting WordPress). For domain names, I think they’re actually the best. If a client was there, OK, fine, I get it. They have a help desk where local people pick up the phone and, in my opinion, can be very helpful. They’re also a good one-stop shop, even if most of the services they offer I don’t use, need or, frankly, want. But you dig through their myriad of products thrust in your digital face, you dodge the add-ons and upsells, double check your cart at checkout that you didn’t accidentally buy some service you’re not sure you understand anyway, and it can be an, let’s say, expected experience. You get what you pay for.

You probably don’t know (or terribly care) but my beloved HostGator was recently bought out by some mongo conglomorate that owns, well, most of the hosting companies, it seems. OK, fine, just don’t touch anything! But they did, of course. “Upgrading to new and improved servers!” Uh huh. Downtime, lots of error pages and load times were all over the place.

[box]There are so many hosting options. Why choose GoDaddy? [/box]

I have a zillion hosting accounts all over the place, including a few at GoDaddy. My partner couldn’t believe his ears when I said I was going to move from his reseller account (where my site just happened to be) to GoDaddy. If you’re still reading at this point, you probably know a thing or two about the website hosting world and for a web designer (who also does reseller hosting and know lots about hosting) to move one of his sites that he actually cares about to GoDaddy is, well, hmm, a sign of the times?

I’m going to stop my little rambling hosting techno-geekery here and let the (early) numbers show what I mean. I’ll post back here in the future and check in with how things are doing. But my partner isn’t laughing at me anymore, he’s laughing with me.

I’ve even had a GoDaddy reseller account for some time where I can offer GoDaddy services at a slightly lower price. It’s still all GoDaddy, just just a pretty Likoma header on top. You can check it out at Likoma.net.

Shocking, I know. But it knocked my load times in half (from 4 seconds to less than 2).

Shocking, I know. But it knocked my load times in half (from 4 seconds to less than 2).

Things have been stable too. No downtime since the switch. Compare that with spotty, dodgy, and schlockey.

Things have been stable too. No downtime since the switch. Compare that with spotty, dodgy, and schlockey.