A peek at GoDaddy

Shared hosting at GoDaddy is cheap, but are they any good?

Earlier I talked about web hosting options, now I will look more in depth on GoDaddy, as they seemed most promising.

Their shared hosting starts at US$3.99 and gives you either Linux or Windows based hosting. With MSSQL (on Windows) and MySQL database access. They charge you monthly instead of yearly as many competitors do. And they don't require you to transfer the domain to them to host the site.

We're the affordable, reliable place to host your site

Linux and Windows plans compared

You can see all details here. Below you can find the most important differences.

Linux	Windows
MySQL databases	MySQL and MSSQL databases
PHP, SSI, FrontPage extensions, Java, ColdFusion, Python, Perl, Ruby	ASP and .NET (1.1 or 2.0), ASP.NET Ajax, ColdFusion, FrontPage extensions
Apache	IIS

Access to databases

You can access databases through a web interface. The interface is easy to use, but simple. You need to understand how to use databases. With MySQL you got an option to dump the database to file. But you cannot do so with MSSQL. There is no easy way for you to move the database in case you want to change hosting provider.

Changes to your configuration

You only have a few options you can tweak on your site. You can add subsites (subsite.domain.com) and set directory permissions (on Windows). All changes to your configuration takes up to 24 hours to complete.

You should not be in a hurry when you want to do changes as it takes time to do changes. When I created a database it took about one hour before it was ready for use. The web interface is always slow - GoDaddy can do this better. It takes a few seconds to load each page.

Access to your files

All files are accessible via FTP. GoDaddy have some limitations on the FTP access, at least on the economy and deluxe plans. You can only have two FTP sessions active at any time, and the speed is limited to 40kB/sec.

In short it takes time to transfer data to/from GoDaddy. If you have 10GB of data it takes at least 72 hours to transfer data off the site. And with small files it takes even longer because of the overhead involved with setting up file transfers.

Uptime and access times

What is uptime? I see uptime as when my website is available on the net. Uptime is hard to measure, as many different factors are involved. To monitor uptime and access times I have used ipMonitor and configured a probe that download a static file every 300 second.

With GoDaddy I have 99.7908% availability the last day on my Linux account (this blog). This is also the average. I have never had 100%. In comparison, the same measurement on Blogspot gives me 100% availability.

Both sites are located in the US, and access times are much higher than in Europe. Speed do not seem to be a problem. On large files you get the bandwidth you expect.

Conclusion

I like GoDaddy. They are cheap, and their products fits me. I just wish I could find a comparable solution in Europe. Until I find this, I will stay on GoDaddy.