Over the past few months I have had the chance to look at a number of hosting companies and their “control panels” by working with a number of clients. It seems as a number of people flock to godaddy.com because of it’s price (really cheap), but I have learned – once again – that you get what you pay for. If you want to have a very simple 1-5 page static web site, go for it – use whatever host you want. If you want anything else, after working with over 20 hosting companies, I can easily say that I would not go with godaddy.com. Why?
- The admin area (control panel) is horrible in general. Not intuitive at all.
- No backup on demand (or scheduled) available
- Working with .htaccess files is a pain – as they do not work right away, there is a “wait time”.
- The admin area (control panel) is slow and sometimes even times out
- Free support is almost non-existent
- Creating a database is not instantaneous
- Paid support (talk to someone) is a joke (at least in my experience)
- I am not alone in my recommendation
I could go on, but I have a busy day ahead of me. What would I recommend? First of all, I have found that working with cPanel is very nice and easy to use control panel. After that, there are a number of good and bad hosts you can weed through. Personally, I have had excellent uptime and support from Liquid Web, but anything is almost better than the godaddy.com hosting.
Ken
Rackspace has no equal when it is time for you to move to a dedicated server. Expensive, but the cream of the crop.
jenz
Yeah – I have heard nothing but great things about Rackspace! Unfortunately, there are tons of garbage hosts out there too.