Yes, it sucks. I can’t believe they get away with selling it as a “premium” service. It’s the same crappy GoDaddy shared hosting service with a cleaner/simpler UI and more expensive resource limits (imitating higher-end hosting services).
Don’t believe me? Let’s go over the issues…
PROBLEM #1 – slow as hell
Yes, slow server. Slow website load, slow server response. It’s a good thing they don’t have much of a control panel for you to realize how slow it is. The server is bad. Is it the worst? Not the worst but it’s slow for sure. I saw a client on php 5.
If you don’t mind your website taking more seconds to load, then by all means use them. But at least we can agree
PROBLEM #2 – php 5
SERIOUSLY?! This is 2018. They’re selling managed WordPress hosting with php5?! It would be like buying a new car that didn’t come with air conditioning.
PROBLEM #3 – slow file transfer
They use SFTP, sounds like a cool security thing, right? WRONG! SFTP is slow as heck. 1gb of files took me several hours on a FIOS connection. They don’t have a web-based File Manager like cPanel.
PROBLEM #4 – locked-in backups
I made this note but can’t remember why I made it. Whatever it was, I must have been really angry to mention it here.
PROBLEM #5 – misleading advertising
Look at their developer plan which says for only $13.99, it can handle ~800,000 monthly visitors. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Your site will feel slow as heck the moment you even get to around 50k visitors/month.
Still want to try GoDaddy Managed Hosting?
Why not? Maybe they’ve improved but I highly doubt it. My experience with them (via a client) was extremely sub-par. You have been warned!
Locked in backups mean you can restore one of their backups but you can’t download one. And since their backups are only saved for 30 days that’s not much of a window for restoring things.
Extra credit, by the way: you can’t simply upload a site you’ve heavily reworked, even if you can get a download (by the aforementioned slow SFTP or if you can find a backup plugin that’ll run slowly enough to keep from running out of resources… while not running so slowly it times out.) Instead you have to install the site on some other public server and then “migrate” it with their tools.
I honestly don’t get why GoDaddy’s such a frickin’ pain in the butt, by the way. Their support folks are some of the best for general assistance — polite and generally well-informed. And they contribute quite a bit to the WP community. Their hosting just happens to be abysmal *and* surprisingly high-priced considering what you get. Plus they’re still holding out on offering free TLS certificates.
Genuinely frustrating.
Thanks for filling in my memory! Yeah, their managed-WordPress hosting felt even more outdated than their regular shared hosting. Terrible performance (not just for the price) in general.
I run one of their reseller systems and I would not sell the managed WordPress hosting. However the top-level cpanel runs WordPress just fine. Need at least one gig of memory.
Thanks for sharing, Michael. Would love to see one of your sites that you have running well on their system.
They suck. No loopback connections, No file manager, and do not allow file permission changes via SFTP. Refuse to upgrade the PHP version. Slow. Crappy support. Did I mention slow?
Haha! All true! Guilty as charged!
I found your article after searching, “Godaddy WordPress hosting terrible”. I’m in the process of moving a site of this platform. Everything is slow as hell and outdated. It has taken way too long to do simple tasks so we can move off this shitty system.
Keep moving, keep moving! There is light at the end of the tunnel!!!
I am a victim but did not know it until recently. They served we very well for many years and I learned the basics of WP using their service 10 years ago. Somewhere along the line, I must have signed up for Managed WP. Now need to find a better hosting service.
A few years ago, I was pricing out registrars and hosting space for “adrianfeliciano.com” and did a search on GoDaddy for availability. It was available, and priced at whatever it was at the time — under $15 if I recall. The next hosting provider was the one with that alligator, and I checked them within five minutes of checking on GoDaddy. The domain was no longer available, and was now displaying a GoDaddy parked page showing availability for $75. Best as I could tell, GoDaddy auto-parked on the domain, since someone showed an interest in it and went elsewhere to look. I checked WHOIS and GoDaddy was listed as the domain registrar.
Long story short, I registered a variation of “adrianfeliciano.com” elsewhere, and would check every couple of months to see if the original version was still registered. I think after 3 years, with no one biting, GoDaddy released it. I found it available again and jumped on it through a different registrar, and not the one with the alligator.
I am still stunned that Massachusetts’ COVID-19 vaccination portal was using GoDaddy’s shitty hosting for their initial roll-out. The web-portal would crash or become incredibly unresponsive under the crush of traffic from people trying to find and fill out a form for their vaccination appointments.
Add all that on top of their super cringe-worthy obnoxious advertising from a few years ago, and yeah, I will never, ever recommend GoDaddy to anyone. I’d rather recommend the alligator webhost over them.