After so many years of using free web hosting providers for my tiny, insignificant blog, I have finally decided to take the plunge and go with a paid hosting plan. Part of the reason is because eversince migrating my blog to the WordPress platform, I started encountering weird limits imposed by free hosting providers… limits which I don’t see in the stats that I have supposedly breached, but the provider says I do. Because I’m on the free plan, I can’t say anything, so I can only suck it up and move on.
Well enough is enough. I decided to look for a hosting provider and I didn’t have to look far. Godaddy.com is where I bought my domain name from, and it also provides hosting services. Comparing prices, Goddady’s were also cheaper than the rest of them. I am only paying about US$40 for 1 whole year of hosting, on the personal economy plan. Typical prices from other providers would be about US$60 to US$120, depending on which hosting provider you go with.
Ok, I guess I get what I pay for. The control panel to set up the domain on Godaddy, although feature-packed, it is unintuitive. Many things I wanted to do, I couldn’t figure out how to. In fact I made such a huge blunder that I needed to ask Godaddy Support for help.
Amazingly, Godaddy’s Support was not only COMPETENT, they were actually HELPFUL! They gave suggestions and requested I make decisions and let them know which way I wanted to go, and they would do the rest on the backend. Never once have I received “canned responses” with many links pointing to FAQs. The techs actually READ your problem, and they KNOW what to do to resolve them! This gets 2 thumbs up from me! I have read other negative comments about Godaddy support on the Internet, and I have to ask – what were they expecting? The emails get read, they give REAL answers to your problems, not canned responses, and things actually get done! What else could you ask for?
Thus far, after Godaddy Support solved my problem, everything has been fine. With my domain and hosting being at the same place, it makes managing things alot easier, as you can just simply click 1 button and whatever changes you made will be updated across the DNS and Hosting control panels, keeping everything in sync.
I still keep the previous “free web host” around. My plan is for it to become my “Disaster Recovery” site, ie the webhost to point my DNS to if anything were to ever happen. Well it happened alot when I was on free web hosts. The servers would go down for as long as 11 hours, and in the meantime I’d just point my DNS to my DR site so that my blog remains “alive”.
I don’t expect that from Godaddy though, but still I’ll keep my “DR sites” around just in case. I’ll have to periodically sync the databases up to keep things up to date though.
Anyway, if you’re unhappy with your current hosting provider, you may want to consider Godaddy. I sure as heck didn’t regret it one bit!
Related articles
- GoDaddy Review (clickfire.com)
- Jumping Ship – Moving Your Website to a New Host (toastnet.wordpress.com)
- Is Free Web Hosting Worth Considering for Your Website (socyberty.com)
- Moving To A Self Hosted Blog (roezer.com)
