Recently, I found Godaddy.com was advertising a new hosting package called “4GH Web hosting” and it was claimed to be the “4th generation hosting”, which is cloud-based, “revolutionary”, even better than Rackspace, GoGrid etc. I was intrigued and signed up. The result? It’s been quite disappointing.
If you’ve been using other hosting services and familiar with cPanel, you’d find the control panel of Godaddy’s 4GH hosting not that user-friendly. It could take 5 minutes to add a new domain and even setting up a SQL database will involve something like 5 minutes’ waiting.
One of my projects needs an additional Perl module that’s not pre-installed. With other hosting companies, I can get it installed using cPanel or write a ticket and they will usually quickly get it installed. With Godaddy’s 4GH hosting service, there’s no way to install additional Perl modules in the control panel. When I ask them to help me, I got a plain No as the answer.
I’ve been using some PHP scripts that runs as cron jobs thus needs to be run as command line and those scripts failed mysteriously once I’ve moved my site to GoDaddy’s 4GH hosting. To my surprise, I found it you run those script via a web browser, they run without problem, but if I launch them in SSH, they all failed. I’ve also heard from other people that PHP scripts often have problem running on GoDaddy’s 4GH hosting.
I contacted their customer service, which is not that good either. While other hosting companies might take a couple of hours to reply a support ticket, it usually takes up to a whole day to get a reply for Godaddy 4GH’s supporting tickets, and the replies are mostly canned messages copied from their help section. When I contacted to the customer service reps from other hosting companies, I usually knew I was talking to a tech person, but at Godaddy, I got a feeling that those people who replied my technical tickets are not tech person at all.
Based on my experience with Godaddy’s 4GH hosting, I guess I must say: it really sucks!