WordPress Review

Paul Zannucci — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:49:54 +0000

Clarification: There are two ways to use WordPress. One is through their free hosting platform at WordPress.com. The other is to install their software on your own hosting, which is generally referred to as WordPress.org. There are some limitations with what you can do at free hosted WordPress.com, which we’ll go through below. On the other hand, by installing their software on your own hosted account (most hosts have one-click installation), you can do pretty much anything you can imagine with WordPress.

So why would I consider WordPress.com, a free blogging platform, to be free web hosting? Simple. Because it is.

More than just “blogging” is capable with the WordPress software, which can handle anything from blogs to complex ecommerce sites and social networks. To be certain, there are some things you can’t do with free hosting at WordPress.com that you can do if you take the software and put it into your own, self-hosted site. But if you are looking for “free,” then you can’t be all that picky, can you? There are severe drawbacks to every free hosting package out there, but WordPress.com is different. It was meant to be free all along.

What you can do

Blog: Might as well start with the obvious. Free blogging is what WordPress.com was designed for, and for that it is fantastic. If you simply have a strong desire to express yourself, you can’t do any better than to go with a free WordPress.com account. They have a copious collection of templates to use, so that you can set your blog up just about any way you imagine. Your blog will probably be picked up rather quickly by Google, and you will also get traffic internally via WordPress.com’s great methods of distributing traffic. Not only can people search all free WordPress.com blogs, but your articles may show up under on other people’s blogs as “possibly related posts.”

Marketing: WordPress.com is a great way to market other sites you may have. They are rather particular in what you can attempt to sell there. You can’t use javascript, and you can’t push things like “get rich quick” schemes, but legitimate businesses may use the free blog to update their customers and advertise their products. You can even run honest affiliate programs from WordPress.com.

What you can’t do

WordPress.com wants to run an honest blogging/website system. Certain things are against the rules there, like running link farms and advertising suspect products. If you are looking for somewhere to push your off-shore gambling and pharmacy business, you have come to the wrong spot. Also, you can’t run scripting or things like Adsense.

Bottom Line: Looking for a handy place to host an honest site with some decent design flexibility for free? WordPress.com may just be for you. It’s a great starting place, and the flexibility of the free themes is pretty dramatic. Know a little about HTML and you can pretty much put up any type of you can imagine by setting it for a particular page to come up first, rather than your blogging entries.

If all you want to do is blog, free WordPress.com is a great spot. Even if you are just unsure of what you want to do, WordPress.com may be a great place to experiment and get your start.

GoDaddy Review

Paul Zannucci — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:22:22 +0000

Was this honest review helpful for you? You can’t get GoDaddy any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link above:

(Note: Before I distract you with everything else, I just want to mention that the very best grid-hosting plan available on the web right now is at GoDaddy, who is offering grid-hosting at just $4.99 per month. That comes with something completely unprecedented: Unlimited Compute Cycles. If you don’t know what that means, just know that it is incredible. The only downside to GoDaddy grid is that you can currently only host one site per account. Also, you should be aware that the price will increase at some point to about $20 per month. At that time, I have been told that you will be able to host multiple sites on the same grid account.)

Many moons ago, I hosted my first site on GoDaddy. I hopped on and registered a domain and used their free hosting credit to put up a website. They ran a few ads on there, but I was happy with it. I was on the web!

I’ve since moved on from those free hosting days, but I still have accounts with GoDaddy. Why? Well, there are some great reasons to go with GoDaddy, now more than ever.

Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am a tough grader (that also means that if you see a really good rating you know I meant it). Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★☆
Pricing:	★★★★½
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★☆
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★½
Power Rating:	★★★★½
Customer Service:	★★★★☆
Ease of Use:	★★★½☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★☆

I always put this rating first because it is so important and GoDaddy has the potential to eventually reach a 5 star here once they finishe up the beta of their grid service. If you go with a standard shared hosting company and grow your site significantly, chances are you are going to have to change your type of hosting, which many times means moving your site to another host, which can be either very time-consuming or very costly just depending upon whether you decide to move the site yourself or have someone else move it. At GoDaddy, there are a wide variety of ways to incrementally improve the power behind your site as it grows. The lowest price plan starts at just $4.99 per month, and the options incrementally go up from there all the way to grid hosting. VPS and dedicated hosting is also available, but that shouldn’t be necessary once the grid hosting comes out of beta stage.

Two other types of hosting they offer are a plan that is specifically designed for WordPress users. From their marketing information: “Harness the combined power of WordPress® and Go Daddy Web Hosting to create your own personal, state-of-the-art Internet blog. The WordPress publishing platform has thousands of free plugins, hundreds of free themes and is completely customizable. WordPress and Go Daddy Web Hosting – the winning combination for your blog.”

The other type of plan that they offer is reselling. You can read my review of this here: GoDaddy Reseller Review.

One other thing of note here, regarding scalability, is that if you end up going to grid computing, you will have to move your site yourself, although I was assured by a customer representative that they will help in the transfer.

Pricing: ★★★★½

Pricing is very competitive. You can, of course, get cheaper hosting if you really want cheap hosting (not recommended). While the grid is in beta, that’s only $4.99 per month, which can’t be beaten. You can do slightly better at Ultrahosting if your needs are for VPS or dedicated hosting. Domain name pricing is great. And if you buy a domain name, you get free hosting. I haven’t tried that, and it may come with GoDaddy ads. Overall, I would say their pricing is exellent.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★☆

If I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a thousand times, ALL HOSTS GO DOWN and experience slow times. That is simply the way it is. That said, GoDaddy is very good. I have their uptime at 99.98% for 2009, and their servers are quite fast, pretty much competitive with the few top-of-the-line hosts out there. Their grid service is not as fast as I expect from grid, but that probably has something to do with why it is still in beta stage.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★½

I hate this one because people tend to want to emphasize their “unlimited” packages. Remember that with shared hosting you can’t get “unlimited” bandwidth no matter how many times the hosting companies advertise it. You only get so many resources allocated for your site. On the other hand, there is one rare exception to this rule. With the beta GoDaddy grid, you get unlimited use of resources, unlimited compute cycles. I have to think they’ll limit that once the product goes to its new status. Otherwise, the bandwidth and storage offered by GoDaddy is near the top.

Power Rating: ★★★★½

Because of their great flexibility and scaling, you are much more likely to get all your “bandwidth” at GoDaddy than you are at most hosts. They are one of three companies, along with Media Temple and Ultrahosting, that I now put into the true, power hosting category.

Customer Service: ★★★★½

Customer support is 24/7 by both telephone and email ticket. I’ve called GoDaddy customer support several times, and the wait time has always been minimal, and the people I talk to are friendly and knowledgeable. I was never transferred around. At one point when I had a site go down for no apparent reason (beta grid), I was placed on hold while my representative conferred with a technician. When the rep came back, he said, “Try it again.” and sure enough it worked. I would give GoDaddy a 5 here except that their customer service line is not toll free. While that has no impact on me because of my cell phone plan, it could cause problems for others.

Ease of Use: ★★★½☆

Whenever I go around and read about people’s experiences with GoDaddy, there are two things that stand out beyond everything else: One, that they are confusing to use; and two, that they are confusing to use.

There is some truth to this. The last time I signed up a GoDaddy account for a client, which was in April of 2009, I went to the site and registered the requested domain and navigated the ads they throw up for “add-ons” and thought I had declined everything. When I got to the check out page, I was presented with over $3000 in charges–FOR REGISTERING A DOMAIN NAME!

It was easy enough just to deselect all the extras, and I found it pretty funny, actually, but for a new website owner, that would probably be pretty scary. And I do think that the sales process is intentionally tricky, but I think it is probably a little trickier than they imagine that it is. I don’t think they really wanted to trick me into paying $3000 for a domain.

Once you have properly purchased what you need (and only what you need), users still complain about confusing control panels, but I haven’t seen a problem there. You may have to get used to their set-up, but that is the same with any host. I don’t find their panels difficult at all. To be sure, they are different from everyone else, but you just have to look around a little bit, and you’ll find your way pretty quickly.

Really, they get a bad rep here where I don’t think it is fully deserved. They simply are not that hard to use, and they have plenty of one-click installations of the stuff you are likely wanting to run. If I were rating this just for me, I’d give them 5 out of 5 stars, but since other people seem to find them confusing, I’ll go ahead and hedge downward.

Overall: ★★★★¼

I think that GoDaddy is a host that I would recommend for pretty much any of their hosting plans, from shared and reseller to grid and dedicated. And if you are looking to host one site (for the time being) that needs a lot of power, I would make GoDaddy’s grid service your top selection. In any event, the incredible ability to scale your hosting to almost any need you could ever imagine having makes GoDaddy a very smart choice.

You can check out a site that is actually run on the GoDaddy grid here: Tee Shirts

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WordPress Review

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