I have a few websites and, in my whole internet life, I have had dozens.
I have used dozens of different hosting companies: BlueHost, DreamHost, Ala Mode, GoDaddy.
There are a lot of really terrible hosting companies out there. For example, DreamHost is excellent if you never need any customer service help, but they have no listed telephone number on their website.
There is a lot of give and take. You can pay a lot for hosting and get lots of customer service, or you can pay less and get no help whatsoever.
I thought I had it made when I recently switched to GoDaddy.
$5 per month for hosting, lots of space and free email addresses...and the customer service agents are located in Phoenix, Arizona-- so I don't have to speak to anyone who has trouble with English.
As far as hosting reliability though: GoDaddy sucks. GoDaddy is the worst of the worst. I have been with them for a couple of months and I can say without a shred of doubt in my mind: The hosting is very unreliable and I can't wait to find a new company.
I have been working on AZWM.com non-stop for the past month. When I say "non-stop," I mean that I am on the site, working "live" about six hours per day. I have a ton of work to do.
About 2 or 3 times per week, the site goes down right in the middle of my work day. The real question is: How often does it go down and I'm not aware of it? A lot, it turns out.
GoDaddy hosting goes down a lot. (Here is an interesting article called GoDaddy Hosting Sucks)
That can't be good for my SEO if Google crawls my page while the whole thing is down. I want my site to be up and functioning when the Googlebot comes through.
It's down right now. I just hung up with customer service and they told me that they know of the problem, but they have no ETA.
The last time I called, a customer service rep told me that if I had "so much luck with other hosting companies, than [I] should go back to my old hosting company." That's great customer service, am I right?
I use different tools to check my page's load time and down time. The best way to do that is Pingdom.com, but if you know of any others, please leave a comment.
My old, slightly-more-expensive host always tested as excellent, super-fast, mega-quick and never down. For the extra couple of dollars per year, I am going back to them.
Once again, I learn the hard way: You get what you pay for.
Goodbye GoDaddy hosting. I won't miss you.
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