I actually used GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress until recently. The fact is that it is ‘Managed.’ That means GoDaddy takes care of the important stuff like installing WordPress and the associated DataBase, site optimization, backups, and site security. They also don’t limit you on the amount of resources you use. That’s why they Blacklist certain plugins that will interfere with GoDaddy’s management of your WordPress site. For me, I thought it was a perfect solution because I’m too busy to worry about all of that stuff anyway.
Unfortunately, GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress comes with drawbacks:
1) It is shared. I read (though I can’t confirm) that GoDaddy sometimes runs 17,000 websites on one server. My experience was that my website’s ping time was about 2 seconds for the first 90 days. After 90 days, I was lucky if I saw ping times under 5 seconds. GoDaddy’s money back policy, coincidentally, runs out after 90 days. The lesson here is that neither W3 Total Cache nor any other plugin will help you if it takes 5 seconds for the server to even respond.
2) GoDaddy limits the number of visitors to your Managed WordPress site. So after you reach your limit (which is way too low for any type of ecommerce site), GoDaddy just shuts your site down until the end of the month. Granted they may not have actually shut my site down. It could be that the response time was so long that my browser timed out. Anyway, it was still unacceptable. When you call GoDaddy’s Tech Support, they try to sell you one of their high-end hosting packages.
3) GoDaddy disables the normal WordPress Cron Jobs. So, if you have a plugin that needs Cron in order to function, it won’t. Also, normal WordPress functions that rely on Cron Jobs (such as garbage collection), don’t work until GoDaddy allows it–which might be two weeks down the road.
4) GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress doesn’t work well with WooCommerce (the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress). For instance, when a customer wanted to remove an item from her shopping cart (on my website), it wouldn’t go away. As soon as she browsed back to the shop page, the shopping cart would show the item in the cart again. WooCommerce Tech Support told me I had to change hosting providers if I wanted to correct the error.
So, I changed providers. Now, I have no limits, I have Cron Jobs working, my webpage pings in about half a second (thanks to W3 Total Cache) and loads completely in about 2 seconds. And it cost about the same as GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress. The down side is that I have to manage it myself. That’s okay. I’ll accept it.
