Over the past few months I have had the chance to look at a number of hosting companies and their “control panels” by working with a number of clients. It seems as a number of people flock to godaddy.com because of it’s price (really cheap), but I have learned – once again – that you get what you pay for. If you want to have a very simple 1-5 page static web site, go for it – use whatever host you want. If you want anything else, after working with over 20 hosting companies, I can easily say that I would not go with godaddy.com. Why?

• The admin area (control panel) is horrible in general. Not intuitive at all.
• No backup on demand (or scheduled) available
• Working with .htaccess files is a pain – as they do not work right away, there is a “wait time”.
• The admin area (control panel) is slow and sometimes even times out
• Free support is almost non-existent
• Creating a database is not instantaneous
• Paid support (talk to someone) is a joke (at least in my experience)
• I am not alone in my recommendation

I could go on, but I have a busy day ahead of me. What would I recommend? First of all, I have found that working with cPanel is very nice and easy to use control panel. After that, there are a number of good and bad hosts you can weed through. Personally, I have had excellent uptime and support from Liquid Web, but anything is almost better than the godaddy.com hosting.