I have had an account with Godaddy since 2005 and didn’t really want to switch to a new service however dealing with poor performance on their shared hosting and now with the changes to the email services I had a big push to find a new provider.
My main drivers to get off Godaddy were:
1. Overall performance of my sites was horrible.
2. Performance of the Plesk interface was extremely slow and was painful to try to manage my sites. Navigating from one page to another could take 60+ seconds.
3. Removed free emails and the ability to have a catch-all email.
4. Adding SSL to sites was costly and trying to implement some of the “free” solutions was difficult with Godaddy and tended to break over time.
After searching around HostGator seemed like a good starting point for testing a new provider. HostGator ended up having a great introductory promotion and had all the services I needed except for the ability to have a catch-all email. As most of the hosting providers seem to be moving away from having a catch-all email I dropped that as a requirement and decided to give HostGator a chance.
Getting setup was intuitive and easy. I was set up in just a few mins with a temporary domain with WordPress installed. As this was a test of the services, I didn’t transfer the domain but rather took one of my test domains and pointed it via Godaddy to the HostGator services.
Once this was done and I installed the same WordPress theme and plugins as I had on Godaddy, I was really surprised at the performance gains.
Using https://gtmetrix.com/ to do a performance test which a tech a Godaddy gave me to test performance with you can see the results. During this test, DevOpsPlatorms.com is hosted on Godaddy and received an E performance rating with a 10 second response time, whereas JamesGress.com hosted on HostGator received a B rating at just 2 seconds. What a huge performance gain.
SSL was automatic with HostGator, didn’t even have to do anything, and was included. This was very nice and saved me $120 from ZeroSSL.
Emails are easy to set up, however would be even nicer if it had the ability to have a catch-all.
I am still in the process of moving things over and hope the remaining steps are as easy as the setup was and will post updates as things are moved over.
Update 12/5/2021 – Continual Errors on Godaddy WordPress
At the time of this update, I still had jagress.com on Godaddy and now receiving the following errors. This isn’t the first time and no updates were made recently to the site. However, I suspect somewhere in their automation to save on resources and caching processes on startup overnight ends up timing out to the point it errors out.
I really hope Godaddy can take this feedback and improve the overall services.
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