As a Web Consultant and Service Provider I have long recommended Go Daddy to my clients as an easy solution for their web hosting needs. It has name recognition, so that when I say “Go Daddy” to people, they don’t ask “Who?”. They have 24/7 phone support, and being that they are also a domain registrar, it’s just easier for clients to do it all in place. Basically I’ve been recommending Go Daddy out of convenience.

Most clients are merely looking for a reliable solution to host one, maybe 2, business websites. Something dependable. After all, your website is your online representation of your business and your lifeline for attracting new clients. If your website isn’t performing or functioning well, your businesses reputation suffers, not to mention a possibility of lost leads and revenue.

With that in mind, and understanding the needs of my clients, I have become a little more than fed up with crappy hosting. Extremely slow server response and website loading times have been a little more than I can take and are completely unacceptable in my line of work.

Now, I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of technical jargon that comes with hosting, which isn’t going to mean a hill of beans to you. If you are reading this, you just want to know where your site will perform the best, and how good support is when there is a problem. You just need to know that when potential new leads or clients visit your website, that you aren’t going to turn them off or frustrate them. After all, people don’t recognize when things run well. It’s expected. But when they run poorly, not only do they notice, but they remember.

I’ve pretty much broken it down to the 3 things that the average non-tech person cares about.

Tech Support:

I can say to their credit that Go Daddy’s tech support staff has always been friendly and most times helpful, however, Go Daddy offers WordPress hosting as a product, so one would assume that they can tackle any server side issues concerning WordPress expeditiously….or at least offer a concrete solution to a problem. I have not found this to be the case. On more than one occasion Go Daddy tech support has blamed slow website load times on everything from WordPress itself, plug ins ( even when none were running), to my own computer. They have been resistant to ever admit technical problems on their end, and after days..even weeks of jumping through every hoop that they recommend to alleviate the problem of slow load times,
they continue to point blame elsewhere.

I’ll be the first to admit, that WordPress can be a resource hog, especially when running a lot of plug ins and functions on a shared hosting account. Add in the fact that, many amateur webmasters with bad coding skills and limited knowledge are the cause of their own downfall by trying to run 50 websites on one shared account, or by running every script, bell and whistle on their websites. But I’m not one of those people. I’ve been building websites (WordPress specifically) for over 5 years, and I know that a decent shared hosting account should be enough to run 1 WordPress website, running a modest amount of plug ins. So when tech support tells me that everything is fine on their end, and that my computer or ISP is the reason that this ONE AND ONLY website is loading slow, it’s beyond infuriating. It’s insulting.

Tech Support at Blue Host is also very friendly and I have had the occasion to speak with them on a number of issues for various clients over the last 2 years. And there is a big difference. I have always ended a tech support call with Blue Host reps with a solution to what ever problems are going on. I have never had a Blue Host rep tell me that my computer,modem, or my ISP was the likely the problem. If indeed a problem is specific to the WordPress site that I am servicing, they have always been able to pin point it. If the problem has been on their end, they admit it, and fix it. Blue Host has never given me the run around, and if I speak with 3 different people, I get the same answer from each. Not 3 different answers depending on what day it is and who answered my call.

User Friendly:

Go Daddy does not use C-Panel, which is an easy to use dashboard software which is now used by most hosting providers. Now for someone like me, it doesn’t matter much because I do this all day everyday and have worked with almost every major hosting provider. But for non-geeks, this is important. You are already in the dark about all of this hosting stuff, and bad navigation just compounds your frustration. Go Daddy’s account dashboard is not user friendly at all. Response times to get something done such as has adding a sub-domain, creating a new database, and even “one click “installations of popular hosting products can take hours. At times even I have had to call tech support to find access to certain areas of the admin panel which were buried behind other windows.

Blue Host does use C-Panel. Even though the average person may have no idea what all of the menu options, settings and services are in their hosting account’s administration panel…with C-Panel, they are at least easy to find. And getting something done is pretty instant. I’ve never had to wait to perform any basic functions or enable most add on services. The whole thing moves pretty smoothly.

Performance:

This is what it really comes down to. How will my website perform?

I’ve been servicing websites hosted on Go Daddy for a few years now. When Go Daddy is running well, there are no problems. However over the past few months, I’ve experienced sporadic (although temporary) outages, and ridiculously slow load times for no apparent reason. I’m not talking about sites that have gotten a gradual increase in web traffic (which may require more resources) , or sites that I or the client may have added additional plug ins, configurations or have added things like video or audio file hosting. I’m taking about sites that have been built, haven’t been touched, and were running fine for weeks, even months and then just stop working smoothly. They may be fine on Monday, but Tuesday through Thursday are loading slower that Molasses running downhill on a cold day…and you just know that if you are experiencing it, so are your visitors.

For any business owner who has spent time and money directing people to their website and depends on it heavily to wrangle in new clients or make sales, “sometimes” is just not good enough. You only have precious seconds online to capture someone’s attention, and a slow loading website can be the kiss of death that makes your company look unprofessional and affect your bottom line.

[Properly constructed] Websites that I have serviced on Blue Host seem to run smoothly at all times. Their servers seem very responsive, and even navigating the WordPress dashboard flows with ease. I rarely need to use additional caching or performance plug ins just to get their performance up to par, and for the most part, barring any technical issues that are directly related to the website, it has been good experience. And more importantly, clients have been happy with the performance of their websites.

Conclusion: Blue Host wins hands down!

It should be noted that no web host can promise 100% up times. But no one should be experiencing frequent outages and slow load times. How fast or slow your website loads can depend on various factors, but your web host should not be one of them. It should also be said that there are many options to choose from when it comes to web hosting that is going to depend on your needs. What plan you choose is dependent what kind of website you need to host..basically what you are running..and how much traffic you have.

For the purposes of the average small to medium business that is just running one “normal” website of little to moderate traffic, a shared hosting account should be plenty for your needs and provide you with the performance that you need until your needs increase. Of course the better the hosting package you have, the better your overall performance is going to be. Particularly if you have certain email needs. All of those things need to taken into consideration when buying your hosting products. Personally, even if for only one website, If I were purchasing a shared hosting plan ( all of my sites are on a Dedicated Server), I prefer to stay away from the basic (cheapest) plans…I like a little more resources at my disposal, and prefer a dedicated IP address on all of my sites. And it really doesn’t cost much more. After all, this is your business we are talking about. But that’s just me.

No matter what size hosting package you get, For my money and the money of my clients, my recommendation has to be Blue Host. In my experience it has just been an all around pleasurable experience and more importantly, sites..particularly WordPress websites.. seem to perform very well on their hosting platform.