GoDaddy is too slow

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.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

16 thoughts on “GoDaddy is too slow”

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. If this comment works, I have successfully passed through ssh / mysql hell and relocated the database behind this WordPress installation to DreamHost.

  9. Resources about speeding up WordPress:

    All along, even before Slicehost, I have had trouble dealing with traffic spikes on my web server. I’ve used WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. I’ve used XCache for PHP code caching, and for my WordPress object cache. I’ve configured Apache to set caching headers for static files using mod_expires to reduce requests. But I still get load and memory spikes that grind my server into dust. That shouldn’t happen with only 200 visitors per hour (granted, a page view can generate about 50 HTTP requests). Obviously, I’ve configured my server poorly.

    Like many large PHP applications, WordPress can be a bit hungry for memory. So when it fights against MySQL and an in-memory object cache for resources, things can start to get dicey. And of course, I’ve got a few other things on the server. When I get hit by a traffic spike (popular article, spammer runs, errant search spiders, etc), memory goes away fast. The machine starts to swap, things get slow, load average spikes as processes begin to wait for resources, and it all snowballs. I’ve got some homemade scripts that keep an eye on things and attempt to restart various services in order to force things back into line, but it’s a pretty heavy-handed way to deal with the problem.

    In my new setup, here’s what I’m doing to fix it:

    * I’ll be running Apache, MySQL, and Memcached all on separate servers, instead of together on one host.
    * I’m switching from the Apache pre-forking model to the threaded worker model.
    * I’m switching from mod_php to FastCGI (mod_fcgid) and php-cgi.

    There will probably be other tweaks, as well, but those are the biggies. I’m expecting this new setup to handle waaaay more requests than the old one. Oh, and I’m definitely open to any pointers from performance tuning gurus. Please share links and tips!

    Thirty Three Things Every Blogger Should Do After Installing WordPress

    After installing WordPress, most new users ask “What Next?”. Creating and maintaining a WordPress powered blog is simple. However, many new users are often confused by the sheer number of options available. On top of that there are thousands of plugins for further enhancing WordPress. Making the correct choices may appear to be a daunting task. Here are 33 tips to help you get started with WordPress.

    Performance Unleashed: How To Optimize Websites and WordPress For Speed

    1. Minimize the number of HTTP requests
    2. Optimize and correctly display images
    3. Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript
    4. Use a Content Delivery Network
    5. Gzip and compress components
    6. Choose over @import
    7. Put stylesheets at the top
    8. Put scripts at the bottom
    9. Utilize browser caching
    10. Use CSS Sprites

  10. Hi- I’ve just started a new site on Godaddy-using Joomla (it’s not even fully built yet)….and straight away I’m regretting using Godaddy It’s way too SLOW.
    I know because I’ve used other hosts for other websites and none of them have been as slow as this.
    Site takes upro 5-10secs to load, and doing the admin via joomla is a nightmare!…..again too SLOW!

  11. Their MySQL servers are really slow and unreliable. You need to use caching to reduce the burden.

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