WordPress on Godaddy unbearably slow

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Moving_WordPress#Moving_WordPress_to_a_New_Server

I am not a tech wiz but I thought my experience could add to this thread.

I switched my site and WordPress blog from Yahoo to GoDaddy (economy plan) this past week. The WP blog is pretty basic and now it runs unbearably slow. Comically slow. My traffic has sliced in half and to be honest, I’m surprised anyone is still coming … I wouldn’t. The non-WP parts of my site run great on GoDaddy but that is no consolation.

The blog was running fine on Yahoo – so I think the inevitable “it’s on your end” talk is bunkum. (I switched to GoDaddy because I wanted PHP 5 which Yahoo inexplicably refuses to upgrade to.)

I also set up a completely new WP blog from scratch in GoDaddy under another file to see if my transfer had messed things up. The new – and empty – blog runs slow as well.

The question now is who to switch to. I think I am going to try Bluehost because WordPress recommends them (https://www.ads-software.com/hosting/ – although they also recommend GoDaddy) and I could only find one complainer of WP speeds on Bluehost (and it appears from reading the thread the issue is not with Bluehost). No, my search was not comprehensive but the complaints are certainly not as prevalent as with GoDaddy in this thread. Bluehost also appears to have great customer service.

Anybody in my situation is probably having the same concerns as I when deciding whom to believe – am I a plant for Bluehost. As you can see this is my first message in this forum so it is a reasonable conjecture. However, if you go through the complaints on this thread several of the complainers have been posting in this forum frequently making it less likely they are plants.

Lastly, I have had several issues with GoDaddy even before this dealbreaker. I signed up specifically for GoDaddy’s PHP 5 and clarified I would get PHP 5 with a representative. After signing up I learned I could not get PHP 5 because they signed me up for grid hosting. So then they signed me up for another 3 months (in addition to the 3 I had just purchased) to make the switch to shared hosting. I have had to call support about half a dozen times at an average wait time of 8 minutes. They are helpful native English speakers but some give the lackadaisical help-guide response and don’t appear to know more than I do. I understand this can’t be avoided, and would not switch if not for the WP speed dealbreaker.

I will post again on how it goes with Bluehost. I have no idea who is the best host, but from my experience, GoDaddy problems with WordPress are a serious issue.

My GoDaddy customer number is 34821750.

Follow up of post immediately above.

(1) It appears GoDaddy has severe problems with MySQL (which WordPress uses). If you Google for this issue the complaints are numerous. And they all sound the same, hosting is fine except where MySQL is involved.

(2) I switched to Bluehost today. WordPress runs significantly faster. I am happy.

I don’t want to become a Bluehost shill because my experience and knowledge about hosting is limited, however, I think the following is a crucial difference between Bluehost and GoDaddy. After my GoDaddy experience I was fearful of being locked into a contract. Bluehost makes you pay up front for a year, but you can cancel at any time and get your money back for the unused length of your hosting. This is a huge incentive for them to offer a good product and a feature one should look for when seeking a hosting service.

From the info on the GoDaddy site and experiences reported on the web, I don’t believe I will be able to get my $30 back from GoDaddy although I am going to try.

I was warned not use Go Daddy several years ago. I heeded the warning, but recently took on a client who already set up their hosting with them. Now I understand why I was warned. Most days, the blog takes too long to load. Other days it doesn’t load at all. I have been using Dreamhost for years and never had any problem. They can be a little expensive, but they make up for it in a reliable product and excellent support.

I don’t remember if this is mentioned in this thread or not… but sometimes there’s an issue with FastCGI GoDaddy WordPress sites.

If you’re having issues, try logging into your hosting account, then select Settings>>File Extensions. From there, edit the extensions to run without FastCGI.

Hope this helps!

I have been with GoDaddy for at least 10 years and can give an honest assessment. At times there has been some slow downs but I think most can be attributed to bad code in the programs I was running. I use Coppermine and have several WordPress blogs running in one Deluxe Hosting account. Recently I set up a WP blog for a very good friend who’s opening a yoga studio, Just Breathe Yoga @ Rivermark in Santa Clara, CA. All was fine from the beginning and then I installed a newsletter plugin where a lot of people registered the first day. This morning i checked the site and it was very slow and even timed out nor could I log into the Admin Manager. I emailed Godaddy support then started looking into issues thinking it could be a database problem. Because I’m very anal about backups (aren’t we all!!!), I decided to create a new db and imported the tables from the backup and lo and behold, I got an error message with the newsletter table. Seems it was storing the date/time in the subscriber table in a not so friendly MySQL fashion. I deleted the subscribers and the import went fine this time. Now the website loads fast again!

So, sometimes while it may look to be a hosting service company problem, it could be your own. Also, if you are using the cheapest hosting plan you can’t really expect any company to jump on all these issues since for $4/month they would go out of business fast. They won’t go into your hosting account, check your database, or do any of these issues unless you can give them some info on what may be wrong. I believe you should spend a fair amount of time figuring it out yourself just as I have all these years. But the take home message here is “do you have a backup system for your blog???“

I’ve also decided to put my friend on a RSS newsletter instead of one that may make GoDaddy mad at using php mail. Check this out here at wpbeginner. This is a great resource for cool additions to your WP Blog.

Cheers,

Billy