As many of you know, I wrote a post about DotWeekly needing new hosting and I really wasn’t looking forward to the change! I hosted with HostGator since 2008, which was a pretty long time and everything was pretty good until more recently. I wasn’t aware of it, but Hostgator ownership had changed, data center changed etc. Well, I did a fair amount of reading and most said to get away from Hostgator as it was having negative SEO effects on sites and plus server response times were getting 3 seconds + just to respond, which is not good. Some website load in under a second, let a lone just waiting for the server to respond, then the site to load…
So I set out my search to get the best bang for my buck, something that would be trusted and also something that was easy! I’m not a tech guy, I’m a domainer! I didn’t know how to move databases, site files etc! I lost DotWeekly’s database in a hosting change before and didn’t want that to happen again! I was looking for click, click, click magic!
Finding an honest review on website hosting isn’t easy, and I noticed this during my search for a new web hosting service. DotWeekly uses WordPress so I was looking for something WordPress specific, because from what I have read, things can and are done to help optimize things for WordPress via hosting. Several offer WordPress specific hosting but I was also finding rates in the $20-$50 price point every month. I was paying $9.95 a month with Hostgator and was hoping to keep it around that if I could.
GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting to the rescue!
GoDaddy hosting? I thought they sucked? I did as well, but a couple people stated they got better and they were using them… so I figured I would give it a shot!
I was very use to the user interface at GoDaddy, so purchasing the web hosting was little to no different than registering a domain name! Thankfully (and still is), the WordPress Hosting that I was looking for, happened to be on sale and was nearly identical to the price I was paying with Hostgator. I selected the “Business” plan from the other Starter and Pro options. $9.99 a month for the business plan, plus I was able to select if I wished to pay by month, by year or even out to 10 years! This time around, I picked to pay for the whole year as it locked me into the $9.99 price per month and if I didn’t like it, I wasn’t stuck beyond that.
GoDaddy offers “Sales Support” which I used and had somebody virtually by my side the entire process and I was able to transfer all the site files from Hostgator to my new managed WordPress hosting account in just a couple clicks! Really, just a couple clicks! All I had to do was enter in my FTP login details from Hostgator and my login details for this site. Click! Site was transferring. I’d say it took about 15 minutes to transfer everything and I got an email that the site was ready to go.
During the transfer, you can select to put the site on a temp domain, which I did. When everything looked good (the one thing that I questioned, was a cache plugin that I was using was “black listed” and removed, and this is because GoDaddy takes care of the cache), I simply changed domain name servers for DotWeekly.com to the standard GoDaddy servers and I was done! That part wasn’t documented very well but I knew it had to be done. There is a settings tab in your web hosting account page for each site you have. You will also need to set your domain name you are using instead of the temp one.
It really was that easy and I’m happy for that!
The business package that I selected, allows to host 5 WordPress sites and allows some 250,000 monthly unique visitors and 500 GB of storage (which is about 110,000 images or 2,500 videos)
Speed tests show some improvements over my past Hostgator hosting, which is a good thing! The speed still isn’t to the standard that I would like it though and some of that will have to be taken care of on my end with theme tweaks, which I’m not totally sure how to do yet. Pingdom.com site load times have been as fast as 2 seconds for DotWeekly which is pretty darn good, but also reach out to almost 5 seconds from time to time. I’d like to keep it around that 2 second or less rate but considering with Hostgator my load time were reaching 14 seconds + it already is showing a big improvement. This is nice for the readers, and Google also likes fast loading sites!
So, if you are looking for some hosting for a new WordPress driven site, I would consider the Managed WordPress Hosting with GoDaddy! Transferring in an already existing site was scary for me, but it was really easy to do. In the end, I transferred 3 WordPress sites and each one I did got easier and easier to do! They also have basically a 1 click system to install and get going using WordPress as well, so that is nice for building out more sites. If I get to the 5 site max and or feel the traffic is getting close to the max, I can always upgrade the pro version for a little less than $30 a month for 25 sites and unlimited storage.
Putting a cap on the # of sites you can run seems a little BS to me. 5 websites doesn’t leave a lot of room, and then you have to pay $30 per/month for more. Come on godaddy…
I think you’ve made a wise choice. I was reluctant to switch after all the horror stories I’ve read, but Godaddy hosting has come a long way in the past few years. There’s never any hiccups/downtime, along with 24/7 support.
I have been happy so far, so hopefully that continues! The biggest thing from the start was the ease of moving the site and I really had minimal (if any) downtime. I’m sure most wouldn’t have known I switched hosting and I did it on a weekday, mid day. I think I normally would have waited until a Sunday evening or something like that but all went smooth.
Hi Jamie,
I am looking into new hosting and i am curious if you still feel as good about Godaddy hosting now. I figure it’s been a few months.
@Todd,
Yes, I still would recommend it. I had one blip of downtime not that long ago but in general all has been good otherwise.
Thanks Jamie