Brace yourself for this one… GoDaddy is a crummy hosting company, especially in regard to business websites. Just to be clear, I don’t hold any animosity towards GoDaddy. I just need to get this off my chest.
Prospective clients reach out to me all the time about their website that loads too slow, doesn’t always work right, and has a couple glitches.
9 out of 10 times, it’s not their website that is the problem – it’s the hosting. And the primary culprit? GoDaddy.
What really matters when it comes to hosting?
Hosting effects your business. Slow sites, hacked sites, and broken sites are bad for business.
While web hosting is quite complex, the criteria that matters to most of us is pretty straightforward:
Speed & Performance: how fast your website will load
Stability & Reliability: how consistent is this performance
Security & Trust: how safe is your website from attacks, and how safe are your visitors when they visit your website
Simplicity: how easy is it for you to manage your hosting.
It’s those 4 areas where GoDaddy under performs relative to other comparable hosts.
How does GoDaddy stack up?
GoDaddy actually lists off the same criteria as the benefits of their hosting service – especially with their higher-end plans.
The Truth: higher-end plans do have the potential for much better performance, reliability, and security, but only if you have the skill and time to configure everything properly. In other words, you’ll have to pay someone so you can actually realize those benefits. So much for simplicity.
Keep in mind that a hosting environment is constantly evolving and changing. So to maintain acceptable levels of performance, reliability, and security, someone has to regular perform updates and modifications. Again, simplicity is out the window on this one…
The net of all this: GoDaddy will sell you the parts, but you have to put them together. The thing is, they don’t ever tell you that. They imply that everything will be running flawlessly, right from the start.
So… What is GoDaddy good at then?
- Advertising and brand recognition
- Domain registration and management (although, they are not keeping up with some of the other big names in the industry)
- Developer-focused hosting. If you’re a systems administrator, GoDaddy provides all the parts you’ll need to build your custom environment
If not GoDaddy, then who?
I’ll be honest, I’m pretty passionate about this one: WP Engine
They are only an option if you have a WordPress site, but if you still aren’t using WordPress for your business website, then hosting is far from your biggest problem…
What to love about WP Engine
Blazing fast performance – no configuration needed
Bedrock-type reliability – no configuration needed
Fort-knox level security – no configuration needed
Beyond simple – they have a plugin to migrate your entire site by clicking a few buttons.
Hosting is one of those things where the best solutions are the ones you forget even exist. In other words, it works from the moment you start, and just keeps on working.
