GoDaddy web hosting versus A2 Hosting: While looking around for a private Git hosting service, I ran across a company named A2 Hosting, and I have to say, their hosting services have opened my eyes. For the last few years I've been using GoDaddy web hosting services for most of my web hosting needs, but if A2 Hosting is anywhere near as good as their documentation and service plans, a year from now they'll probably have all my web hosting business.
GoDaddy v A2 Hosting - Web hosting comparison
The best way to compare the A2 Hosting and GoDaddy web hosting services is with the usual comparison chart, so here's my comparison of these two web hosting services, at least in terms of my needs. Note that these web hosting comparisons are generally for the "shared" web hosting services of the two companies, unless otherwise noted.
| A2 Hosting | GoDaddy | |
|---|---|---|
| Insane User Interface | - | YES |
| Disk Space | 50 GB | 10 GB |
| Monthly Data Transfer | 50 GB | Unlimited |
| Periodic Server Backups | YES | - |
| Email Accounts | Unlimited | 100 |
| SSH Access | Yes | Yes |
| CVS, SVN, and Git Hosting | Yes | - |
| Cron Jobs | Yes | Yes |
| MySQL Databases | Unlimited | 10 |
| Postgres Databases | Unlimited | - |
| SQLite Databases | Unlimited | - |
| PHP5 | Yes | Yes |
| Java | - | - |
| Ruby, Rails | YES | - |
| Python | YES | - |
| Perl | YES | - |
As you can see from many of those line items, A2 Hosting seems to be much more of a "developer friendly" web hosting company than GoDaddy is.
Other A2 Hosting and GoDaddy web hosting features
Next, from the perspective of a business person interested in starting a new web development business, here's a comparison of other GoDaddy and A2 Hosting web hosting services that are also very important to me:
| A2 Hosting | GoDaddy | |
|---|---|---|
| Insane User Interface | - | YES |
| Reseller Hosting Plans | Yes | Yes |
| Access to Raw Apache Log Files | Yes | Yes? |
| Client Billing Management | Yes | Yes |
Honestly, I need to take a deeper look into how these two systems would work from the perspective of a web hosting reseller, but this isn't a great concern right now. I've had some problems with slowness on some of my GoDaddy websites, so I'd probably want to rent some dedicated servers rather than go with shared web hosting plans as a reseller, and getting all those details will probably take some phone calls.
A2 Hosting and GoDaddy web hosting comparison - Summary
In summary, when comparing A2 Hosting and GoDaddy web hosting plans, I currently lean towards A2 Hosting. The A2 Hosting web hosting plans seem more "developer friendly" than the GoDaddy web hosting plans, and if I didn't mention it, the GoDaddy user interface makes me want to jump out of my window every time I have to log in. (It is one of the worst user interfaces I have ever encountered, and I shudder when I think that I'd have to see more of it if I signed up to be a GoDaddy reseller.)
Followup: I've written more about my A2 Hosting experience in my A2 Hosting review (2010) article.
As a final statement in my GoDaddy - A2 Hosting webhosting comparison, my prediction right now is that a year from now I will have migrated all of my websites from GoDaddy to A2 Hosting. All I can say after that is check back a year from now and ask me how that went.
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