I was looking for a shared website hosting for a long time and I found a few that it is not a shame to recommend. And GoDaddy is one of them.
As most of other shared hosting providers, GoDaddy allows to manage websites using cPanel. And the first pleasure was that in cPanel we could see how much resources does the website(s) consume. Here is the list of parameters available
- CPU usage (%)
- Memory usage (MB)
- Number of processes
- I/O Usage (!)
- Number of files
- Disk space (total size of files)
As soon as I noticed that I/O is not unlimited, I was sure that this hosting will be fine. At the moment of writing, most of hosting providers does not limit disk input/output. In such a situations some sites in shared hosting are able to generate too heavy I/O which makes other websites frozen. The easiest way to check this is to take a look at Load Average:
Even if I can not say that hard drive in this server is relaxing, Load Average is acceptable.
The overall picture look even better when we take a look at server’s memory usage. Over 50% of RAM is used for caching filesystem:
That’s why Google Webmaster Tools reports quite good response time from this server. Most of files are cached in memory and returned to a client without any disk access at all.
We could see that it almost never took Google bot more than 0.5 set to get response from this server. It’s a good performance.
Also this server is equipped with fast enough CPU, which makes me think that packing backups will not become a problem for even huge sites.
GoDaddy allow to install custom SSL certificates and does not require to purchase IP address for that. This is a huge Plus.
There are a few minuses at the same time. The server have two IP addresses: private and public. Private is used for SSH access and public one is used for DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, etc. This is not a big problem, you’ll just have to remember that they a different. And that’s all the minuses I’ve found.
So I want to say that GoDaddy provides one of the best shared hosting services I’ve found so far.