You Don’t Have to Use GoDaddy for Hosting Just Because They Sold You a Domain

As a business owner, all you probably care to know about “web hosting” is that it’s required for your website to be up and running online. And to be honest, that’s about the most important aspect of the service – that it keep your website online. So, imagine how many unhappy website owners there are right now, since GoDaddy - also the world’s largest domain registrar – saw fit to add this preemptive message to their support hotline this morning:

If you are experiencing a problem with your hosting, we are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it as soon as possible. – GoDaddy Support

That’s the first thing you’ll hear right now if you call GoDaddy Hosting Support – before you even get a menu of options. The one site I was hosting with GoDaddy will not be hosted with them anymore after today.

3 Recommended Hosting Companies
(all Better than GoDaddy)

• DreamHost - Starting at $5.95/mo; Incredible customer support; one of the best one-click WordPress installs available, and honestly one of my favorite shared hosting providers. Promo code ‘R3R‘ gets you a free domain ($10 value) when you sign up for hosting.
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• HostGator – Starting at $4.95/mo; The only con your developer might point out is that the hosting control panel they provide is slightly limited, which requires some changes to be done by their customer support
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• BlueHost – Starting at $6.95/mo; excellent service and, in my opinion, one of the best values in the hosting world.

Ok – now back my rant: when a company the size of GoDaddy announces to every single customer who calls the support hotline that they’re having an issue with their hosting – that’s a big deal. You can bet that thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of website owners and administrators are none too pleased with the impact this has on them. Their websites are down. And they have to wait for GoDaddy Hosting to fix the issue. Period. The good news? There are other (better) options out there.

When you buy hosting you’re essentially renting space on a special computer (the host), where the files for your website will reside. The one thing you expect of the hosting company is that they will keep your site up and running. When they fail at that primary task – especially on a scale like this, and on a repeated basis, as with GoDaddy – it makes it clear that price is not the only factor in choosing a host. GoDaddy is cheap, but is saving $50 a year worth the down time and speed sacrifices versus other top notch hosts?

If you don’t have someone else making the decisions about hosting for you, consider these three alternative hosting companies that get high marks. Don’t just go with GoDaddy because that’s where you bought your domain – you have options.