[Hidden-tech] Rackspace vs. GoDaddy?

[Daniel Fried]

Dan,

I don't have any direct experience with GoDaddy for hosting, but I can tell
you this; Rackspace and GoDaddy are fundamentally different models.  GoDaddy
is a commodity web hosting service... the "much better" pricing is for a
part of a shared server, and you will have no control over, or even
knowledge of, what anyone else is doing on that server.  If they run a
script that brings down the server, you go down with them, if they have
crummy security and get compromised, you can get caught in the backlash.

Rackspace is a much different beast.  Everything depends on who the
"reseller" in your case is.  When I did small business web development I had
a server with Rackspace (after a number of other providers who were cheaper
but had more issues) and I was able to justify the higher prices I charged
my clients for hosting by the fact that I knew everything that was on the
server and controlled all the code on it.  I couldn't promise that it would
never go down, but I took responibility for the uptime of the entire server
and my clients would never get an answer of "well, someone else on your
server must be doing something... but we don't know what and there's little
we can do about it until we can stop the server from going down 10 seconds
after it comes up each time" (and yes, I have gotten that answer from shared
hosting before).

I did always let my clients know that the more expensive hosting we offered
was only an option and we didn't require it, but just about all of our
clients went with it anyway because they knew we would take the
responsibility.

-Dan

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Dan Gronwald <dan at danielmgronwald.com>wrote:

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>
> Hi HT'ers,
>
> I have a client that is hosting 2 websites via a reseller using Rackspace.
> One site is HTML with Wordpress blog, the other is purely HTML. I suggested
> GoDaddy which offers much better pricing but I'm not an expert on Hosting
> services and servers. For the most part they just want to host their
> websites but ensure that it's reliable and won't be "down" all the time.
> Their current tech-person says to stay with them, using Rackspace, because
> of the reliability it affords them, which they believe GoDaddy will not.
> Opinions?
>
> Any advice, input would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dan
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