WordPress on Godaddy unbearably slow

I’ve been with GD for 8 years now and I’m thinking of switching. For registering domain names, and if you have a site with little to no visits they seem to be great (and cheap).

But as my blog continues to get more and more visitors (at about 40k pageviews per month) the pages load slower and slower. I’ve done all the tips (installed supercache, optimized database tables, removed plugins I wasn’t using, etc.) and only got minimal speed increases. I’m hesitant to even call their support because it sounds like they will just tell me “it’s wordpress” and I will have wasted 20 minutes of my time. I know there are plenty of wordpress blogs out there much more complicated than mine that run a lot faster.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good hosting providers?

I checked my shared windows hosting account on godaddy with the reverse lookup and found 3,416 other sites hosted on my IP address. This is crazy.

@gdhosting,

What the deal with the new grid vs. legacy hosting? I was told by GoDaddy support that only the legacy hosting would support fancy/permalink urls and that grid would not. Anyone else have any experience with this???

I got permalinks working on GoDaddy WIMP with their new grid hosting where they do not have Microsoft URLRewrite installed, thanks to an article by John Sessford. I have posted a reference to John’s article, code and my GoDaddy tailored instructions at my new WP site located at https://www.49thlatitude.com/wordpress/wordpress/permalinks-on-godaddy-wimp which nicely uses the new permalinks ability. – Dave

I know its a pain to move over to another provider, but Laughing Squid hosting is fast, easy to manage and works great with WP.

And they are a nice bunch of guys who actually support their product. And at $8/month for basic product offering, its in line with GD’s cheaper offering without the performance issues.

Guess I just need to chime in here. I am experiencing HORRIBLE speed issues on my completely Stock GoDaddy CP Install of WP (acutally I installed the Maintenance Mode addon for now until I can get the problems resolved). I also have a subdomain for my son there that is running Drupal and it is just as bad. I emailed support and complained about the speed, and also mentioned this thread in my email. I let them know that my renewal is due in a couple of months and that I’m seriously considering finding another host because the speed issue is not acceptable.

This is their Support reply:
hanks for contacting Online Support. I have tried to visit your sites, but it appears that you have them in “Maintenance Mode” so I was unable to duplicate the issue. The two software programs that you are running on your hosting account are database driven, that being said we do not provide database optimization. The most common problems with latency on WordPress and Drupal sites are related to databases not being optimized.

In respect to your databases and optimization, you may wish to consult with a community forum online or do a search on your favorite search engine as other users may have encountered a similar problem in the past and may offer helpful solutions.

Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.

Sincerely,
Andrew P.
Online Support Team

Obviously they didn’t look at both of them, as only one of the sites is in maintenance mode. I guess they don’t want my business after all. I’m going to have to look for a host, more than likely on a shared server since that is all that I can afford- so I’m hoping to find one that can offer acceptable speed for a decent price. It’s a shame though.

Hostgator.
Hostgator.
Hostgator.
Hostgator.

Have hosted my WP sports blog (more than 3k posts in the DB, 4,500 unique a day, home page load times routinely 0.450 with 52 queries) there for 6 years and never once had a problem. In fact, I was part of their VPS beta rollout and I put a WPMU community on it with over 4,000 users and 200 blogs and it screams using their $39 package.

Hostgator.
Hostgator.
Hostgator.

And, no, I don’t work for them. But I will tell you that every time I found the CPU running higher than 5, they always investigated immediately. Every server I’m on (6 of them) stays consistently in the 2 range.

Otto42 has given the best advice from what I have read so far. I had similar issues with GoDaddy ( which I’m an affiliate of ). WP-Super-Cache, PHP5 & a static IP seem to have resolved this. Personally it seemed to me that Akismet slowed things a bit as well. Even when not running along with WP-SpamFree. I’ve chosen WP-SpamFree as my solution for now. Keep the number of plugins your using low as well. The more clutter the bigger the chance of problems.

I’ve never seen FTP related issues to this point. But the WordPress media upload process has always been slow & completely useless to me. Easier to just FTP and copy link into article. Just my 2 cents for it is worth.

I should add I wouldn’t use GoDaddy phone support if you paid me. No matter what Orange County Choppers showed you. Several years ago I tried using the phone to resolve a major problem. Biggest mistake ever.

I’ve been having the same problems with Godaddy now for over a year. Sometimes I have to ask myself why I don’t switch. I guess I’m just uneasy about the process of switching a smf forum and wordpress blog over to another host.

What is most frustrating is that the service will be very quick at times.

GODADDY, IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN DO TO SPEED UP MY SITE LOAD TIMES?

troutlegend.com
troutlegend.com/forum

My GoDaddy hosting is fast… as long as you aren’t loading a WP page. My Directory browsing directories are FAST! I bet it’s the MySQL access that’s the bottle neck. Would it be better being an “External DB”.

I’m using a Windows system.
https://www.weintraub.net <- incase GDHosting wants to contact me.

Bottomline is that GoDaddy shared hosting blows for WP-Blogs. But in life, you get what you paid for. I’m thinking about switching as slow loading time is not good for my business or anyone else’s for that matter.

I’ve heard and read good things about Bluehost and hostgator. They only thing that compells me to stay with Godaddy is that I’m used to them. Customer Service tries and they pick up the phone.

Maybe the upgrade to a dedicated server is in order.

Unfortunately, I’m not paying the cheap economy plan, but the unlimited plan. So yeah, maybe a dedicated server might be needed.

Damn ,
i ve just signed over & paid for the Godaddy Deluxe hosting plan. Man,my site is now so slow!! It takes at least 20 seconds to load the screen! Godaddy – Iwant my money back!!! Totally useless….. ??

i just switched to hostgator… problem solved…. Godaddy, you again fail!!!

I’m in the same slow boat. I’ve directed 3 site owners I manage to godaddy and am now dealing with the fallout from this poor decision. Can anyone point me to a tutorial that shows a simple migration method for transferring a WP install from godaddy to another better host?

I’ve installed wp-super-cache, and done other tweaks, but the core problem remains.

As a stopgap, is it possible to upgrade to dedicated hosting with a few mouse clicks? ;-). I only need to use these sites through May 2010.

Feeling our pain, Joe