Surfing Hosting Accounts
While navigating three hosting accounts in one morning I remembered more than I wish I had forgotten about the in’s and out’s of relative advantages of different hosting companies. Administrating Wordpress websites is about as easy as being a webmaster can get short of editing mere HTML pages strung together. But it can still be a headache. And performing tasks in MySQL on no coffee is torture.
I went between Godaddy.com and 1 & 1 Hosting, between 1 & 1 hosting and Hostgator, and back again from Hostgator.com to Godaddy again. This is the chore when different hosting accounts get different parts of the hosting account offering formula right and different parts of it wrong. Experiencing multiple hosting account interfaces before breakfast can take a lot of elbow grease and keyboard forgiveness.
A lot depends on the browser. At one point in the project I realized I had both Firefox and Internet Explorer open because one hosting account stayed open better in Explorer while another transited better between navigation screens in Explorer. But Explorer seemed more secure in certain parts of the hosting account interface where security was tighter, and Firefox sort of stalled in the Backup/Restore pathway of commands.
GoDaddy.com does have a cornered market on the Godaddy Hosting Connection installation utility. It’s a nice arrangement that unfortunately you have to learn to be comfortable with. Control panel and ControlPanel Deluxe have that absolute party favorite of all hosting account surfers, Fantastico. Except to get version information you have to sift carefully and compare versions and perform upgrades per application before executing database restore and upload tasks.
The jury is never really out when debating which hosting account vendor online is the best. Certainly Enom.com is a stable bedrock names registrar. but just try and get a name hosted there or working with any application without Indian medicinal juju working for you. Frustration with one hosting account leads to the germination of another at a new company. This cycle can only continue so far.
Godaddy.com has the most fluid domain manager but the bells and whistles flavor of the nonstop “Buy This” circus inside a hosting login can’t exhaust even a patient webmaster fast. This administration environment seems very commercial next to the minimal functionality of the Hostgator Control panel. The Fantastico “hosting connection” delivers good install functionality for third party applications, if the versions are consistent with the “exit” versions on other outgoing site hosting accounts.
What this means is that a WordPress install at Godaddy might be at Wordpress 3.01.01 yet the Fantastico release at HostGator might have the WordPress installation release only at 2.98.2. This means the security and support is not guaranteed for custom tweaks and plugins that are the main feature of the updated Wordpress. Backwards blog migration is never a pretty site.
Thus the hosting account selection equation might be reduced to the smoothest and most updated installation suite. Yet so many functions inside the Control Panel (except Fantastico) can remain untouched for the life of the account. Or worse, they can be experimentally tried with brilliant reactions of equal parts of glee, panic and chaos. Having the tech support number close at hand is a must.
The hosting at 1&1 hosting is a curiosity to me. The custom tweaked interface for administration of the hosting account seems to mask more than it reveals of available and necessary domaining chores. The ease of use never seems to be 100% there. For a domainer intent on SEO and marketing and domain name promotion, supposedly only programmers venture this far.
I have a 1 & 1 hosting account that it took a considerable amount of time to cancel, simply because the process was so labyrinthine I barely got the confirmation of the account cancellation in time. I got quickly into the habit of not using the account because I didn’t like the interface as was constantly stalled by the “lookup and see” factor involved in very simple tasks.
To be sure, Godaddy captures a big part of its hosting and domain business from ease of use and familiarity. But not often do I get the opportunity to see triple hosting company side by side performance. I remember how much I resisted the Godaddy interface on my journey from ControlPanel. I like the direct file management approach but miss the protections and hidden file attributes of the Godaddy File manager.
For the 1 & 1 Hosting file access was almost impossible, rendering many templates and theme graphics closed to customization. I used to cling tearfully to my Control panel until an installation version got so vulnerable to failure almost every operation was liable to disappear from day to day. This is the sort of thing that causes hosting account migration.
My love affair with Fantastico was long and meaningful. But many other administration options when navigating through reseller accounts and multiple hosting trees became necessary. Godaddy is a hosting account utility most webmasters will shoulder sooner or later simply by nature of the amount of domains hosted there. Until there is a definitive result for the best hosting company for SEO, the choice for domainers remains personal.
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Thanks for writing this I had some tough hosting choices to make regarding my nursing site launch and this helped me out.
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Great article, thank you. I use GD as my main registrar but resisted their hosting for a long time. I’m hosting several of my sites there now with no issues to speak of, except for a snafu involving Dedicated IPs a few months ago. I paid extra for dedicated IPs for two of my sites, thinking that it would somehow help with SEO, but discovered two different random websites (one in Mexico, one in China) that were mirroring and redirecting to my site. Very strange. I contacted the owners and in neither case was this something they did on purpose – they claimed they were hacked. I’m convinced something about GoDaddy’s Dedicated IP was the problem – like maybe they’d hosted a spammy hacker site in the past?
In any case, I called GD within a week and asked to be refunded and switched back to regular hosting. No problems since. I also use Hostgator and Medialayer on occasion.
It takes a lot of time to maintain multiple hosting accounts with different vendors. It takes a lot of time to maintain multiple hosting accounts with one vendor.
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im feeling it
Here is the registrar I like to use, the prices seem cheap at $6.99 and they offer free privacy, unlike some registrars.
I agree with what you said, you have a good point