The Story

I am currently evaluating Wordpress as a blogging platform and I am truly amazed by its power. Unfortunately I can’t say this about the performance of my shared Windows hosting account at GoDaddy. This weekend I had major problems accessing my Spamparty test blog. I either would get fatal server errors or the PHP scripts would be timing out after the default timeout period of 30 seconds.

I found on the web that the shared GoDaddy hosting machines are managing 2,500 domains and I used one of the tools that would do a reverse IP lookup. http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/. According to the result of this tool my shared server actually runs more than 4,500 domains. No wonder that under some circumstances the performance (CPU) is really bad.

Figure 1: GoDaddy Shared Hosting is flying

So, what can you do?

The first thing you can do to drastically improve the response time on the server is to contact GoDaddy support and explain them your situation. I used the following phrases, that seemed to get picked up by their automated support system:

1. Performance is horrible and unacceptable
2. My site is down
3. My site is unusable
4. I am loosing money
5. I need to cancel my account

You need to send them messages like that hourly.

Coincident or not

After the second message all my problems where gone. The response time is still slow, but I don’t get the “500” errors and the script timeouts anymore.

Shared hosting is driving a car blindly

The biggest problem with shared hosting is the “black box” environment that you have to work with. You don’t know what is going on on the server. I really need a reference system that I can compare the shared hosting server to. I was thinking about setting up a Windows 2008 R2 server that runs MySQL, PHP and Wordpress. I will use my Quad-Core 8 GB desktop machine. Running the same application on the beefy machine will give me a reference point and I can compare it with the shared hosting server. I wonder whether the shared server is 100 times, 1000 times or even slower than my desktop computer.

Ausblick

Of course I am still curious about the latency. I am using about 20 Wordpress plugins on my blog at the moment and I was hoping to add another 20. On the one side I am disappointed about the really weak performance on GoDaddy’s shared hosting on the other side these hosts provide a great opportunity to learn debugging, profiling and troubleshooting weak performance scenarios. And in my case it is just a playground blog. I know already that this hosting plan is not good enough for a production level blog.