Setting limits in a good way. GoDaddy is at it again!

I have to admit, my first impressions of GoDaddy were rather negative. I have always loved their domains. But after training myself to use Yahoo! and cPanel, GoDaddy’s email and webhosting backends were ugly and confusing. And don’t get me started on the limitations I ran up against first time I tried to run WordPress on a GoDaddy hosting plan.

A lot has changed since I signed up for my first GoDaddy account in 2005. Some of the most exciting changes are happening now, in 2014.  Among them are:

• cPanel webhosting with Installatron has replaced their old control panel. (Installatron is a script installer. Comparable to Fantastico or Softaculous)
• Customer Service has only gotten better with time.
• Customer Service rep confirmed that they have plans to add more services, for an additional fee.
• Email is changing. GoDaddy now sells email space with the options of creating unlimited email addresses and adding Microsoft Office 365. This change is expected to carry over to resellers soon. If you prefer the old style of plan, where you pay per business email account, I suggest you sign up through my reseller site ASAP ( www.HarmoniousHosting.com )
• Hosting will soon make you pay for the resources you use. A GoDaddy rep recently told me that currently, someone can sign up for a Deluxe hosting plan and host  200 websites for just $8.99 per month. As you can imagine, 200 websites use a disproportionate amount of the server’s resources.
  Starting later this year, you will have to pay extra if you want your website to use extra resources. Example: My busiest website uses about 22% of its memory limit. If it were to explode in popularity over the next year, I might have to pay an extra $5 to bump up my limit.

As a web developer who supplements her income by selling webhosting, this has been a long-time annoyance. Webhosting tends to come in three varieties:

• Dedicated servers give you the most control over your website’s resources and who these resources are being shared with. But they are expensive. Especially when you factor in the cost of someone to keep them running smoothly.
• Cheap Shared hosting can be unbelievably economical. But many hosts have a tendency to oversell their resources. As the server becomes overloaded, performance will drop.
• VPS (virtual private servers) is a nice middle ground.
• There are also sites that let you build on their platform. These tend to be expensive for how much space and how little control you get. But if they meet your needs, they can be a reliable option.