WordPress at HostGator Faster than Go Daddy

Mark Berry January 18, 2011

Back when I first converted this site from BlogEngine.NET, I posted this comparison:  WordPress at Go Daddy Slow Compared to BlogEngine.NET. It showed that Google’s crawler was often taking 1000ms and more to read each page from Go Daddy.

I finally got tired of the poor (and sometimes hung) performance of the Go Daddy server and moved the site to HostGator on October 20, 2010. The improvement was immediate:  HostGator serves the site twice as fast as Go Daddy, and much more consistently:

The faster performance has continued, averaging under 500ms per page:

In fairness, I have to add that a client’s non-WordPress site at Go Daddy loads much faster than mine did. I don’t know if Go Daddy’s slow performance is related to MySQL (required for WordPress, and hosted on a separate server by Go Daddy), or if my site I just landed on an overloaded server, but I’m much happier with HostGator as a shared Linux host.

WordPress at Go Daddy Slow Compared to BlogEngine.NET

Mark Berry June 19, 2010

Through the end of May, this blog was run on BlogEngine.NET and hosted on a Small Business Server through a DSL connection with a maximum 768 kbps upload speed. On June 1, the converted site went live on WordPress at a Go Daddy shared Linux host. I thought that performance would be at least as good on more powerful software at a well-connected host. So I was a little surprised to see the Google crawler’s statistics:

The per-page time is significantly longer, though still well under two seconds per page.

Using Gzip in a Cron Job at Go Daddy

Mark Berry June 2, 2010

I wanted to copy my web site and subwebs from Go Daddy to my local machine. My trusty old WS_FTP32 client kept disconnecting partway through the (large) download. I installed FileZilla, and while that got further, it ultimately disconnected as well.

I figured if I could compress the larger folders using gzip, I could just download a few compressed files. But this Go Daddy account doesn’t have shell access. How do I run gzip? With a Cron job!

Go Daddy Email Too Smart for the Cloud

Mark Berry December 18, 2009

A small customer has an in-house mail server. After some recent DSL connection woes, I’m getting nervous about this single point of failure for their email service.

The customer’s Go Daddy domain and hosting accounts include free email addresses and forwarders. Could we move the email to Go Daddy’s servers to get a more robust, redundant solution?