Last updated on June 26, 2011
An entire day of being unable to load the WordPress dashboard — and months of page load times approaching what feels like infinity — got me upset enough with GoDaddy last Friday so as to want to change hosts. So I decided to overcome my fear of technical details and moved my blog to Hostgator, which was suggested by my colleague Don Taylor since it hosts The Incidental Economist.
So far, so good, and after a day, I would encourage everyone who is in my previous situation to move their blog from GoDaddy to Hostgator. Page load times have decreased significantly, and I have a better grasp of the technical back end. What this means for you, the reader, is simply that you will not have to wait for minutes for specific pages to load.
The entire procedure was not difficult, but it does require a bit of technical know-how. For those of you who are interested in moving a WordPress blog from GoDaddy to Hostgator, you can find very helpful instructions here. And if you would like to subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog so as to not miss a post, you can do so here.
For the record, here is the response I received from GoDaddy after I contacted them with my issues, edited for brevity and technical simplicity:
“Dear Marc,
Thank you for contacting online support.
During our review of your account, we were unable to duplicate any slowness with your site. Additionally, we did not see any issue with the operational status of your hosting account and your site appears to be setup and accessible without issue. In most cases, slow performance on a database driven web site is the result of too many database connections being made by the site code or the database itself needing to be optimized. You can optimize the database tables from within in the phpMyAdmin interface provided with the hosting account.
Sincerely,
Dave P.
Online Support”
Well Dave, isn’t it funny how the exact same site, with the exact same database on a different host works just perfectly?