I see some good places to start on past posts…we are looking for hosting referrals to get off the GoDaddy hosting…please post here or email me directly. Thanks.

Max 10 second load times/average 3-6 seconds. I want blazing fast load times. I have no IT/Server Management experience. I’m hosted on a Windows Server, which many say might be a part of my problem. I just reverse IP’d my site. Get this: it come backs with 4,681 domains hosted on the server?

Is that possible? Moving this website will be painful, but perhaps not as painful as it was to set it up on GoDaddy Windows server in the first place.

This may be a combination of end use and hosting/server performance – and then PHP download timing out.

According to http://www.web-inspect.com my site take over 2 – 10 seconds to load at an average of 5-15K/second. This is way slower than any other competitor/site I could think of testing.

After being on the phone with them they suggested switching to a dedicated IP (for $3/month), but I’m not very confident it will make a difference… Might be time to make a change.

I am 1 year into a 3 year plan. I doubt I rewnew. I was happy at first, but it just keeps getting worse. I also called godaddy and they gave me the “it’s not them, it’s me.” I have tried a number of different things with no measurable results. During Peak 7-10 CST hours there are times I’m not even able to pull my site up.

It’s very frustrating.

I’ve added that tool to the post – for the sake of completeness

After my above post, I took the jump and moved all my clients website from Go Daddy’s Hosting to HostMonster.com. Most of them involved PHP and MYSQL. The response time improved hugely. It was well worth the move – my clients are so much happier. There is no reason to sit and wait for pages to load.

I didn’t really want to leave Go Daddy, so I called support 4 or 5 times, talking to supervisors, etc. They all wanted to blame my webpages for “too much going on”, even when I explained that the same EXACT page on a different host responded 10 x as fast. There was nothing left to do. They wanted to help me but couldn’t, and I couldn’t put up with the slow response times. So I switched. Took me a few weeks to get everything in order, but I’m glad I did.

Hope this helps some.

Actually, I know about load-balancing (squid is often used for this purpose in the free software world), I just never stopped to think that GoDaddy might be using something like that

Actually, load-balancers might not be the case. To the best of my knowledge, this approach is usually applied to a single high-traffic resource (or a group of those), but not to a thousand of minuscule-traffic sites.

I guess the only load balancing is done at the MySQL level, by spreading users’ databases across many (telling by IPs – real many) separate MySQL servers.

A single quad-core quad-cpu server with 8-128GiB RAM can easily handle a few thousand low-traffic web-sites without any load balancing. Of course, if all the low-traffic sites have the same peak hours, then all the sites will be slow in peak hours.

Anyway, my shared hosting account has expired about 3 weeks ago; I’ve overgrown shared hosting and jumped to a personal collocated server. Managing it requires some skills, and it costs noticeably more than shared hosting, but I’m satisfied so far.

Actually, I’m providing hosting services now off my server, but those are mostly of interest to Ukraine-based customers.

I’ve definitely experienced slow response specifically with pages that use PHP and access MYSQL. It doesn’t matter how involved the page is, how empty the database, or how simple of a query, the page can bog down during peak times to where it either times out completely or responds with “MySQL server has gone away.”

After hours of calling, and going through the same thing (reps telling me my code was too complex, needed optimizing, etc.) I don’t have much of an answer. I have a dedicated IP (lookup only shows the 17-20 domains I host with that account), and it doesn’t help. They finally just recommended going to a dedicated server, but that’s a major cost upgrade.

I always thought that the major problem is with their MySQL servers, as my log files very often show “MySQL server has gone away during query” messages (or similar “Cannot connect to MySQL server”). So if you manage to put together some PHP script which doesn’t use MySQL, I would expect it to be pretty fast (an example would be switching to PHP’s built-in SQlite file-based database, but it looks like not that may programs support it at the moment).

Please report here if you succeed with “dedicated IP” positive performance effect (which I doubt).

As for the “super host” – I didn’t try anything else US-based except for GoDaddy. I suspect that Ukrainian hosting might be of little interest to you, so I won’t offer it.

I found SliceHost to be potentially interesting (VPS starting at 20$/mo, sound disk/BW limits for cheap). Theoretically interesting is also http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-vps.html (mmm… “unlimited” with an added guarantee of CPU/RAM and/or MySQL performance).

Personally, I now have a server, which only needs to be collocated somewhere. After that, I’ll start playing with free Hosting Control Panels to choose one which will work for me. After that, I’ll be giving away free hosting accounts for about half-year of further testing. There will be separate announcement on this blog when that give-away happens. (After the free period, services provided and prices will be comparable to those of slicehost.)

when I tried (at 09:30 UTC), your blog was pretty fast. Actually, on the non-first front page load it was done in 4 seconds (measured by YSlow). All the other pages I tried were also below 5 seconds in loading times. (First page load was slower than those times)

Thus, I think that 25-30 seconds might be the case in peak hours only. From my experience I know that “peak hours” do exist at GoDaddy

As for Deluxe/Premium: I don’t know if moving to one of these will put you on a better server or increase some undisclosed CPU/speed quotas – you may ask the Support or some knowledgeable GoDaddy person. The main reason for me to move to Deluxe was the ability to host unlimited sites with it.

I’m getting page load times between 25-30 seconds consistently for 383 KB. I am running Wordpress using their Hosting Connection.

might be the reason

Using reverse-ip tool, it looks like the number of domains hosted on my exact “shared” server at GoDaddy has fallen from ~3700 in March 2007 to ~2700 as of July 2008.

Also, I’m now some 3 years with GoDaddy, and it might be that long-staying customers get some “indirect” benefits.

But still, own server is way better , especially if you don’t have to pay for the server’s outgoing bandwidth.

I do have to admit that you do get quite a reasonable load times. I suspect that GoDaddy either accidentally or deliberately treats different customers differently. It may be that I originally got stuck with an overcrowded server but another possibility is that I am running a strictly private page without the visibility of your blog. I wonder if GoDaddy is more accommodating to pages that are more visible like yours.

I’m now more or less satisfied with page load times of this blog and gallery2 I have here.

However, I’m currently assembling my own server from off-the-shelf components to collocate it with some ISP for about USD 20/mo That’s 3 times the price of Deluxe shared plan, but still a lot cheaper than VPS/VDS solutions, and I’ll have full (remote) control over server, and will be able to sell some of it if I want to. However, this adds the hassle of maintaining the server, which I’m prepared to face.

I think the domain management is great, but the performance is horrendous

please see my update 6 to the post text. And I’m still with GoDaddy, as the service quality trend seems to be positive.