Go Daddy web hosting still makes sense for me.
Yesterday Go Daddy suffered a major outage that appears to have involved its DNS services. The outage lasted about four hours.
Back in May I switched from a small web host to Go Daddy, which means that Domain Name Wire was offline yesterday as a result of the outage.
Let me start by saying that downtime for your web site sucks, and yesterday was a frustrating day.
But does it make sense for someone like me to change hosting providers as a result of yesterday’s outage? I don’t think so.
I left my previous host because of site downtime. The downtime usually hit when I had a big traffic surge, which is the worst time your site can have issues.
Since changing to Go Daddy I haven’t had any downtime until yesterday. Although I haven’t had any huge traffic surges (which I’d define as 500+ visitors on the site at a time, which is a lot for a niche site), the hosting has handled much smaller traffic surges with ease. The same surges that would have brought my site down with the previous host.
So overall Go Daddy is working really well for me.
But even if I were to switch hosts, who would I go to? That’s where you need to take a step back and put Go Daddy’s downtime in perspective.
As soon as the Go Daddy problems started yesterday, countless hosts started pitching Go Daddy customers to switch. But many of these same hosts have had multiple outages in recent months!
Consider the big (and I mean BIG) customers that use Amazon’s cloud computing services. Many of them have had outages that lasted over a day.
Is it acceptable? Absolutely not. But a one time outage is understandable. Go Daddy will figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again.
Some people may think this analogy is silly, but it kind of reminds me of when there’s an E. coli outbreak at a national restaurant chain. Lots of people stay away from the chain for the next couple months. But really eating at that chain is probably the safest place to eat once the outbreak is taken care of…because the chain is being extra vigilant.
Yesterday was frustrating. No doubt about it. But not enough to warrant changing web hosts.
Paul Nicks says
Thanks for your support Andrew.
Michael Ross says
I think that another problem is that you couldn’t change nameservers or dns records because your domain is also with godaddy.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Michael – you could backdoor into it through the IP address, as I understand.
Acro says
Michael Ross – You nailed it.
Andrew – Politics aside, GoDaddy hosting is considered “non performing” by pro standards. Yes, it’s cheap, yes, there is supported by live employees, but when they charge $150 just to retrieve a back up, that does not fly with me. I’ve used many web hosting companies since 1996 and I would not recommend GoDaddy hosting even if it were for free.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Acro – I don’t care what “pro standards” are.
Yeah, Go Daddy is a type of shared hosting. I know that. I had a dedicated box at my last host and they couldn’t perform. I’m not a techie, so I need a hosting firm that can just make my site work.
Uzoma says
Both sides have a point. Godaaddy is cheap and reliable. The small guys are cheap and unreliable.
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Michael Ross says
Andrew
I just suggest that if your hosting is down and you are not sure when it is going to be back up, you would want to be able to point your domain to somewhere else as quickly as possible. In this situation you weren’t able to do that. I don’t really see any problem in deciding to keep your hosting with godaddy, every host does have downtime. But maybe have your domains and hosting at separate places.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Michael Ross – wouldn’t I then also need the site to be replicated elsewhere? Or would “secondary DNS” do the trick.
From what I understand you could still get to GoDaddy yesterday via IP.
Domainer Extraordinaire says
Andrew you should be embarrassed to have domain names at Godaddy. 🙂
You make a good argument for using their hosting though.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Domainer Extraordinaire – a couple years ago I had minimal domains at Go Daddy. Now I have a few hundred. The reason I moved several hundred over there? Their Premium Listings service.
Mubashir says
i would say godaddy is much better for domains and hostgator is the best for hosting domains.