Everyone either talks about how bad Godaddy is, or how cheap they are, but where does Godaddy stand today? I am a .NET developer and also a newly registered Godaddy user I am here to put this issue to rest.
The main issues that drew me to Godaddy was the low startup price and the ability to host multiple domains per hosting account. You heard right, Users of the Deluxe Godaddy web hosting account ($6.95 a month) can now host as many websites as they like on one shared hosting account while only paying $6.95 per month! So whats the catch? Read on...
The Godaddy Catch
- Slower than average page loads.
- MS SQL database is limited to 200mb, (upgraded from 100mb)
- Can't remotely connect to your database.
- Godaddy can not tell you how big your MSSQL database is.?!
- Horrible online tools to manage MSSQL database.
- No support for MS SQL 2005
The Godaddy Advantage
- Ridiculously cheap way to host dynamic .Net websites.
- Asp.net 2.0 support
- Low cost MSSQL hosting (200mb)
- MySQL databases share hosting space (100gig)
- Killer hard drive space (100 gig)
- Killer Transfer (1,000 GB)
For comparison purposes, my database has a few thousand records and is about 1 of my 200mb. I only know this because i have a copy on my local computer that is fairly current. But i am okay with this as Microsoft SQL server 2000 hosting is very rarely cheap.
My Recommendation
Yes, you can host unlimited websites, and they are dirt cheap but only go with Godaddy if you are dirt poor, like me. The page loads are not so slow that users become frustrated, so that is good, but they are annoying to me because I know how fast they are on good hosting.
The biggest complaints I have, is the fact that i had to upload my database one table at a time. This took quite a while being that i had to export 7 different tables to 7 different .csv files, and import then 7 different times. This is how you do it if you use their tools. Your only other option is to pragmatically insert your data which most people don't have time to do.
It is also really frustrating that you can not easily backup your whole database. You can only export data one table at a time as a .csv or xml.
Even worse, you can not even see how much of your 200mb quota you are using up. If you use the Linux hosting, it is not such a big deal because MySQL puts your unholy amounts of hard drive space to good use.
At any rate, good luck! I hope this report helps you to decide weather Godaddy is right for your website.