My GoDaddy 4GH hosting review

Here's my GoDaddy 4GH hosting review: It sucks. A friend on Twitter warned me about it, but sadly, I didn't listen.

As a backup to that "review", here's the downtime on just one of my websites for the last several days:

• 5/19/2011, 10:51pm - down nine minutes, forty seconds (9:40)
• 5/21/2011, 2:54am - down nine minutes, forty-six seconds (9:46)
• 5/23/2011, 12:54am - down ten minutes, thirty-two seconds (10:32)
• 5/23/2011, 2:20am - down one hour, twenty-five minutes, fourteen seconds (1:25:14)
• 5/23/2011, 9:57pm - down 39:43
• 5/25/2011, 7:05am - down 9:48
• 5/25/2011, 3:27am - down 4:49
• 5/25/2011, 2:45am - down 22:26

This is just GoDaddy 4GH downtime -- it doesn't even get into "poor response time" (slowness), which I know from trying to edit my websites is constant, probably 10-20% of each day. I've gotten into the habit of making a copy of any editing changes I make on the websites, because you never know when it's going to fail to respond.

It's important to note that the problems aren't with just this one website. During this same period of time, three other websites I currently have on the GoDaddy 4GH hosting plan also experienced slowness and downtime.

I'll share more GoDaddy 4GH downtime information when I can, but right now I'm just trying to get GoDaddy to fix the problems.

One other rant: GoDaddy doesn't tell you anything about downtime, planned or unplanned. The only way I was able to accurately record the downtime events was by using a service called Uptime Robot, which checks your websites periodically to make sure they're up and running.

Note: All of these websites are running Drupal, either Drupal 6 or Drupal 7. There's nothing crazy I've written, just off the shelf modules and themes with very minor modifications, mostly to the themes.

GoDaddy 4GH review - Summary

In short, despite what their marketing material says about remarkable uptimes and redundancy, my review of the GoDaddy 4GH hosting service is you get what you pay for -- you don't pay much, you don't get much.

My impression is that GoDaddy has oversold their server capacity, so each website is just barely crawling along, and then fails completely at several points during the day.

GoDaddy 4GH performance problems - Followup

It's about ten days since I first wrote this post, and the GoDaddy 4GH slow performance problems continue. I've been working with a nice woman from GoDaddy, and she said a few things, including the server cluster they put me on is currently under a DDOS attack. She offered to move me to another server cluster, but said there was no guarantee that cluster wouldn't also be under a DDOS attack.

Last night I set up a system on my iMac here at home that would hit my website every two minutes and record how long it would take to return a web page. (I did this with the Unix time and curl commands.) These tests have shown that retrieving the exact same web page every two minutes for a little more than twelve hours varies from 0.4 seconds to 56 seconds, with 960 attempts taking five seconds or longer.

At some point I'm going to have to move to another hosting plan (probably A2 Hosting, which has been working well for me), but for a couple more days I thought I'd try to help this person at GoDaddy because she's been nice about trying to help me.