GoDaddy is making moves to shed their long-standing reputation among the industry as being an example of “you get what you pay for” with regards to their hosting plans. I’ve heard countless horror stories of poor performance, sites hacked, poor support, etc. In the past I’ve warned people to steer well clear of anything GoDaddy, but it’s often difficult as their prices are hard to beat as long as you can avoid the barrage of upsell attempts.
The guys over at WP Tavern recently had the GoDaddy guys guest on their podcast WPWeekly Episode 177 – Hanging Out With GoDaddy. Listen to the podcast at the link or catch it on Stitcher.
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by three GoDaddy employees:
- Jeff King, General Manager of Hosting and Security
- Mendel Kurland, WordPress evangelist
- Kurt Payne, developer of the P3 plugin and GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress platform
We discuss changes made after Bob Parsons stepped down as CEO and how they’ve helped create a new culture within the company. Kurland describes what it’s like to be the first WordPress evangelist and explains his role in helping to establish relationships with people in the WordPress ecosystem. Payne provides details on GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting platform and what makes it different from competitors.
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Near the end of the interview, King shares details on a new product called GoDaddy Pro, which will make it a lot easier to manage clients on the GoDaddy platform.
The biggest takeaway from the interview is that, GoDaddy has made and continues to make radical changes. It’s not the same company of a few years ago. If you’ve written them off in the past, I encourage you to give them a second look.
When GoDaddy acquired MediaTemple (a long-standing high-end host) the big question was would they bring MediaTemple down to GoDaddy levels or would they incorporate best practices from MediaTemple to elevate GoDaddy. From listening to the podcast and the GoDaddy guy’s explanation of the system it sounds more like the latter. All customer facing storage (files, databases, etc) are SSD driven with several layers of caching in front of it for performance. They incorporate a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that sounds similar to the solutions from Cloudflare and Sucuri to keep most of the bad guys out before they even reach your site and they proactively monitor for exploits for security.
GoDaddy’s WordPress managed hosting is up against some stiff competition from the likes of WP Engine, Page.ly, and Pressable, among others. And while I can’t yet say I 100% recommend them over and above any of these, I can certainly say it’s worth taking a look.
photo credit: Hanan Cohen via photopin cc
interesting. what hosting to you recommend instead of go daddy? I’ve only ever used that
Well, it depends on your needs and whether you want managed or not. If you need explanations on the difference let me know :)
For unmanaged VPS I like Linode and DigitalOcean.
For managed VPS I like Knownhost, Cloudways*, WiredTree*, LiquidWeb*
All of these have SSD choices, fit a variety of pricepoints, have great customer service.
If you’re using WordPress ONLY then you’ve got a different set of hosts (I mention them above). I haven’t used them, but they seem very pricey and in the case of WPEngine I’ve heard a few stories of huge bills since they charge per visit (which I find a little odd). I’m considering using GoDaddy’s WP hosting (NOT shared;) )the next time I need a WP host although I’m not sure when that’ll be.
* = I have not personally used them, but I hear lots of good things
Glad you enjoyed the show. We learned a lot as hosts as well. Thanks for listening and passing the word on to your followers, we appreciate it.