Bye bye GoDaddy

It was a bumpy ride in 2009. Many highs and lows. I enjoyed every moment of it. December 2009 is an important month for javapapers. My hosting provider GoDaddy kept me completely busy.

As almost everybody ;-) in the web world I also got my due share of problems from Go Daddy. It all started with trying to host multiple domains using the same hosting account. Economy pack didn’t have multiple hosting option and I was asked to upgrade to next higher plan by paying more bucks. Without spending much time on research I paid the amount. How stupid I was!

What I finally got was a hosting account mapped to one primary domain with all the sub domains visible through the primary one! I raised support requests. I got prompt replies. But I feel like yelling here. All the replies I got are from their robots! Can you imagine they have a software robot to reply for customers. If their robot is that much intelligent they need not be in hosting business. They would be providing software products for NASA.

It just grabs the keywords and responds with same pre-formatted template replies. I tried my BEST to reach a real person and all went in vain. This is what triggered me to look for options. One more issue I was living with from day one is too much advertisement. Their control panel is a crap. To find even a log out link it will take minutes. I was with Godaddy for atleast three years and got used to this interface nightmare.

One more issue (problems list with Godaddy is quite long) was, I am not able to map to a third part DNS server for a domain name. I had a domain registered with them and I was trying to point it to a third party hosting provider. Initially it gets set. But after a week or so (I am not able to find out the window period) they reset it to their own DNS server and a default page, which has tons of garbage advertisements.

I tried couple of times to point it back to my server, but I think they have a cron job to redo it again on a defined interval. This is a serious issue in the hosting world. I know this might be a very odd case but the real problem is I couldn’t get help from their support staff. Finally I was determined to ditch Godaddy and move to a new hosting provider.

This time I did volume of research on hosting providers. Cheap providers are off my list and I had quality as first criteria. I got some three providers. Then finally narrowed down it to mediatemple. Yes it is little heavy on bills, but I heard every penny is worth it. Multiple domain hosting option is a real carrot from them and the clean plesk control panel. I took the bait.

It was a very difficult process from moving the application, data from one hosting provided to another. Main thing is to avoid the downtime in between. You migth blackout and that might cause serious damage to rankings in search engines. I had to go through volume of blog posts and help documents. Finally I got succeeded without any damage.

In transfer of data, mediatemple phpmyadmin’s response is slow. Sometimes even I thought server is down. This is the only issue I got so far. As data import is a very rare job, I am not much worried about it. It is smooth sailing thereafter. Its been a week and there is no incident. We need to wait and see for performance of the mediatemple’s famed servers.

Voila, now javapapers is served to you from mediatemple. Of course with little extra cost for which I got extra quality. I got clean interface to deal with, excellent multiple site hosting option and above all a real person to get support. Do you realize that the pages are rendered quicker by fraction of a second ;-) Bye bye Godaddy.

Wish you a Happy New Year 2010!