Charles Lau dot Com

Godaddy has a very reliable hosting for the public. In fact, they work on their shared hosting servers with the mind of reliable hosting! I would rate their website to have the best sales copy amongst all the web hosting websites in the world! Their prices of domain names and hosting solutions are very competitive with lots of new plans coming up. I can really expect this company to be ready for ISO standards anytime.

The Best Sales Copy in Web Hosting World
I have never seen any web hosting company doing any better than GoDaddy in their killer web copy! Their web copy would be very soft with you to buy a product which you are interested in. They would start with asking you if you want to buy a domain name at a low price… Once you got hooked with the purchase down the sales funnel, they would recommend a hosting plan or some traffic attraction tool for you to consider… Whether you say yes or no, they would just push a little bit more and ask again in the next page. When they are very sure you are not interested, you proceed with your purchase. After you have purchased, they would lower their price of some products and ask you again for your option to purchase…

After you have purchased something with them, you would get a regular discount email offering… Letting you know of their current promotion! Some of them are really attractive and I must say I bought a few out of it! I don’t mind having such offerings as they are sharing with me some really good stuff to use! If they didn’t, I would really be sad… haha

MySQL database management
They seem to have a three-tier management for their customers in sql hosting. Meaning that the visitors would visit the web server, the web pages would retrieve the database from another server before delivering the web pages to the public. Whenever I add a new database, I would have to wait for quite some time before my database is created.. It can be really draggy sometimes but when it is done, I feel safe working on it because it makes me feel it is really reliable! They would assign one of the database servers to host my database, and I would know what database server address to use, and to work on the database name directly! Unlike many shared hosting of MySQL, this database hosting doesn’t need to have a prefix of your User ID or something relevant due to the fact that there might have duplicate database names used by other users in the same server…

Time Lagging For Amendments In Shared Hosting Account
Whenever you make any changes to your shared hosting account like addon domain names and MySQL databases, you will have to wait for the changes to be made which might take from 5 minutes to the whole day! I guess they are doing the whole amendments manually which take a lot of time if there are so many accounts requesting for amendments! To think on the bright side, they are taking pains to make sure that the server is working properly… I appreciate the delay and welcome it as well! I would rather wait for a moment to make sure everything is done properly before hosting is started instantly!

Email Hosting
If you were to use email accounts only from domain names registered with Godaddy, this email hosting is definitely alright for you… However when you need additional hosted somewhere else, you would have to sign up for an email plan! This is something I felt really cheated about and yet I would want to take it for the reason of their solid hosting. But after I signed up with the plan, I felt at ease already since it is no longer an issue with me for my multiple domain names for different websites and email addresses. Only recently, I realize a bug with their email hosting when I could register charles@somebody-else-website.com by accident… Oh I am half-hearted but I don’t think it’s widely known yet in the Internet. And yet, I still went on with GoDaddy because I love Bob Parsons way of doing business! He’s the founder and CEO of GoDaddy.

Dedicated IP Address
I think it is a good idea to have my own ip address with my shared hosting. I bought it and used it. Without that, my website is sometimes very unstable to appear on the Internet! I tried to contact GoDaddy with regards to this problem before in 2006 and yet it couldn’t be solved. I decided to give dedicated IP address a try and it appeared to work properly now… But this is somehow an unnecessary expense again!

Domain Name Purchase
They are probably the daddy of domain names! Somehow, every American that I know of usually refer me to GoDaddy to buy domain names. They wouldn’t want to talk so much about their hosting plans because I heard them saying that it is not friendly to search engine crawlers… I would maintain my domain name purchase with GoDaddy…

Search Engine Friendliness
Godaddy shared hosting is probably one of the most complained topics in Google Groups because of 404 errors complained by the Google crawlers… I am also facing this problem myself as I started to use WordPress. And to date, I think my current host Blue Host has just showed me a zero error found by Google crawlers! Phew I am saved… Previously when I worked out my custom web pages of probably only 10 static pages, Google crawlers have no problem crawling my site and that Google is giving me really good business out of it… I was so happy with GoDaddy at that time…

Trailing Slash Problems
I wouldn’t dare to say that this trailing slash problems are faced by many web masters using Godaddy Shared Hosting. I talked to a few of them and found out that they did nothing about it and yet they are doing fine (But they still face unknown 404 errors.). I saw many people complained about trailing slash problem with GoDaddy in the WordPress discussion and Google Groups… Somehow, there’s one server in GoDaddy which have problem with their configurations…

Conclusion
If you want a stable hosting with “24-hour” availability, you might want to take up GoDaddy hosting if you are not so into websites but to take advantage of their email addresses and probably an internal web site usage.

The servers are indeed very stable… So much so that I am very happy to forgo all other problems just for the sake of having my site up 24/7… However when I realize Google having problems crawling in my site it is as good as the server is down because traffic will be very bad… In fact, I installed a plugin to inform me of any 404 errors found… And Yahoo is also having trouble crawling my site as well…

But you can be sure to buy GoDaddy domain names! I would recommend it for sure!

If GoDaddy were to take up a step and solve some of the problems above, I believe I would be really attracted to them again and that they would probably take on the world with their hosting too (as much as their domain names!)…

Top 3 Things I like
1. Most Reliable I ever Found!
2. Speed Is Consistently Fast!
3. Good Customer Service Program! (But the officers sometimes not that helpful to help me…)

Top 3 Things I dislike
1. Email Bug
2. Trailing Slash Problem
3. Search Engine Crawlers unable to crawl properly