Image via Tumblr user Optimistic Overanalyzer

I have a very tough time speaking ill of others but I’ve concluded that GoDaddy is no longer a good choice for WordPress website hosting.

Some time since the beginning of they year they began throttling their cPanel/Linux disk I/O down to one megabyte per second! This is very slow!  To a point that, as forensic computer scientist Dr. Neal Krawetz put it recently…

This is slower than a USB-1 thumbdrive! You know, the old USB drives where you copy a file and then go get some coffee? With USB-1, you get 12MB/s at full power and 1.5MB/s at low power.

This is with their “Deluxe” hosting. If you upgrade to their “Ultimate” package you get… 2MB/sec I/O!

I run weekly backups and updates on roughly 50 websites spread across a wide range of hosting companies.  14 of those sites are hosted at GoDaddy.  Beginning around February of this year backup plugins started timing out before completion. BackupBuddy, InfiniteWP, and other backup plugins I’ve tried all fail more often than they succeed. Consequently for those 14 GoDaddy clients (and, incidentally, *only* those clients) I’m reduced to logging and using cPanel home-directory backups!

Nor do I seem to be alone in this. Jeremy Trask at BackupBuddy said recently in a response to a trouble ticket I filed:

As I noted previously, we have particularly seen a recent spate of reports like your[s] with Customers on GD who suddenly started having problems and when we check the logs we can see that the disk write speed is very poor and their backup would never have worked before if that had always been the write speed – we know what type of constraints hosts apply and the effect they have and sudden changes of behaviour with nothing else changing always point to application of more aggressive constraints and this is almost invariably disk i/o based on the log characteristic and the fact that this is easy for them to apply when they have the right technology in place.

So really we know pretty much exactly what is happening (whether or not a host wants to own up to it) and in fact we have been observing this sort of degradation in hosting for a while and that is why we are introducing additional options for Customers that are experiencing these type of problems. So from your logs we can certainly help you and it helps us validate our new options.

This is particularly embarrassing for me because I actually like GoDaddy’s ease of use, their low prices, and their exceptionally responsive tech support team.   Even more embarrassing as until recently I cheerfully recommended them to my clients!

But!

If they can’t serve files any faster than an 18-year-old thumb drive (and their tech support mention this throttling is a head-office decision they have no control over) then no amount of pretty interface, ease of use, low price, and fast support can make up for it.