I am thinking of switching hosting providers for this site. Those with a technical bent may wish to read on.
You may have noticed that page loading times on this site have been quite poor lately. Sometimes, they become extremely poor (taking more than 20 seconds to load the main page). I posted a question about it on Ask MetaFilter and it was suggested that I call the company. When I spoke with the tech support people at GoDaddy and they say that page load times of 14-15 seconds are “not bad” for shared hosting. I disagree. This is especially true since I am only using 0.10% of the bandwidth allocated to me.
GoDaddy also said that the only way to get faster load times would be to upgrade to a dedicated server, which would cost more than $1500 a year.
Does anyone have experience with other hosting companies that have been more helpful? With GoDaddy, I am paying about US$45 per year for 5 gigabytes of storage and 250 gigabytes a month of bandwidth. That also includes the cost of the domain. I would be willing to pay a bit more for faster page loads and a more reliable MySQL server. The GoDaddy versions seem to have trouble frequently.
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Some numerical data for those thus inclined.
a fellow blogger has just migrated to GoDaddy.
I have a hosting acount with godaddy 49.00$ and it is slow… on the other han I tried awardspace.com and I pay 0.00$ a year and it is better than godaddy, FTP is faster to, their routing system must be better. is goadddy tring to put tomany people on one routing server and get their cash for it?
From GoDaddy:
Please note that you may only have up to 50 consecutive requests to your hosting account content within a given period or your site will go down temporarily.
I was all excited about using godaddy to purchase my domains and use their Website tonight to build a simple website.
Problem is that the product is virtually unuseable most of the time. To work on your website it can take 5 or ten minutes for a single box to open. There is nothing wrong with my computer and I have a fast connection. Seeing how many others are complaining about the same slowness, it appears I got badly ripped off. This unreasonable slowness was not clearly disclosed.
Very unhappy with godaddy now and they will end up losing many customers.
yeah, don’t worry about dedicated servers…just as slow. My business uses dedicated through Godaddy and we’re getting ready to switch. There’s just too much bad news out there about Godaddy…so i think it’s time to say Nodaddy.
Actually, since I activated caching and reduced the number of entries on my front page, performance has improved a lot.
The MySQL databases are the real bottleneck, when it comes to GoDaddy shared hosting.
I found a way to speed up my hosting significantly. As it turns out, tonnes of spambots were constantly crawling through my wiki. It had been locked down to prevent them from changing things, but they were still using up processor power and making MySQL requests.
By installing the Bad Behaviour extension for MediaWiki, I seem to have sped up the wiki (and the rest of the site) significantly.
I am also using a combination of WP Super Cache and Akismet on my Wordpress blog. I tried using Bad Behaviour, but doing so isn’t compatible with supercaching.
Activating gzip compression within WP Super Cache seems to have sped things up a fair bit.
Next, I am purging MySQL entries from uninstalled plugins.
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