I have been with GoDaddy for a number of years. It all started with the need to buy SSL certificates. You cannot beat their prices, (at least a few years ago you could not). Their interface was terrible but I put up with it for a bargain. Never mind the fact that they would make it so hard to make changes between all the ads. Plus things they did not want you change like auto renew are hidden deep down. Auto renew is great, but I had used my personal credit card to buy a business SSL certificate so I did not want this feature. I ended up buying my own personal domain through GoDaddy and finally purchased a hosting plan for fidgetware. I was never happy with the management interface and config changes that should have gone quickly always took a long time. GoDaddy shows the same data on multiple pages but somehow the key data is on another page. What finally prompted me to move was the poor performance of this blog. It was taking 20-30 seconds to serve up a WordPress page. The static pages were fast. GoDaddy tech support said there were no issues and suggested I install Super Cache, which I finally did with no performance improvement. A few days later performance improved miraculously back to the performance when I started with them. Recently though the performance slowed down again. I could put up with the horrible interface but I need website that is accessible.
Switching was not too hard thanks to the ubiquitous of WordPress and MySQL. I did a data dump of MySQL and copied it to my local machine and copied the wp-content directory locally too.
Signing up with NetworkSolutions was a breeze and I transfered my domains over. While that was happening I setup WordPress and using the PhPAdmin interface did a restore of the exported file from GoDaddy. Finally I copied up the content for the website. Everything is now working about 97% I have few more images to sort out as I changed the location of WordPress.
I had signed up with GoDaddy all the way through to 2012 but have chosen to go month to month with NetworkSolutions just incase performance degrades.
On a closing note Kudos to GoDaddy, I did complain on twitter and they tracked me down and gave me a call. I have moved on, but maybe they heard my complaints.
Tags: hosting