Someone named Katherine replied: Naomi, I was testing some PHP on our Church's website previously that was hosted on GoDaddy. I was running into errors. I found that GoDaddy and their cheapest tier did not support the version of PHP I was working with locally on my computer. I suggested to the church admin and management to move to another host - Site Ground, that I use personally. Everything has worked very smoothly and SG have been super helpful even with their cheapest tier as well. The Church has actually saved some money by making the switch.

Naomi Moon replied: Thank you! I will look into it. GoDaddy has a lot of limits that they don't advertise. I had to change the .user.ini fil to even be able to upload the theme - uploads were limited to 2 MB. I have been regularly reaching the I/O limit of 1 MB/sec, just during my development phase and while running Backups. Then GoDaddy emails the church and says they need an upgraded plan because the website is so resource intensive. I used to use GoDaddy years ago but left because the sites were so slow. I have been happy with HostMonster since then but will explore Siteground for the church as well, especially if they can save money. When I moved away from GoDaddy, I think they refunded what I had paid in advance. Do they still do that, do you know?

Katherine replied: Yes, we were refunded the outstanding months of the two year contract we were in.

Naomi wrote: Follow up: I now have another client whose existing installation is on GoDaddy. Having problems again. Does anyone have this working on GoDaddy???? Also - yes, with last year's client, we switched to SiteGround and all was beautiful. Also have a site on DreamHost that is doing well. DreamHost is free for non-profits.

I wrote: We are having good luck on Pair.com (cvuus.org is the site).

Kirkroberts wrote: Naomi, when I was working as a web developer I eventually began to refuse work from people who wouldn't switch their hosting away from GoDaddy. This may seem elitist, but GoDaddy just has so many problems. A decent inexpensive host is Bluehost. Sounds like SiteGround works well for you, too.

The point is, you can advocate for a client to move their services to a host that will save a lot of time and headache in the long run. Hopefully they'll see the benefit of paying to make the switch and maybe paying a couple of dollars more a month to have a much more reliable and fast website. Good luck!

Naomi replied: Kirk, Thanks for responding. I completely agree with you about GoDaddy. Especially lately, it has been tough on more than one site I have. I use HostMonster for most of my sites; they were eaten by BlueHost. Lately, it has been much harder to get them on the phone than it used to be so I may be switching again. SiteGround does work very well for the church I persuaded to change to. Dreamhost also appears to work very well and it's free for non-profits. I posted my question on the FaceBook UU Webmasters site and it does appear that a few people have GoDaddy working. I'm guessing my problem is the PHP version but I don't yet have access to the GoDaddy hosting credentials to find out what version is on this particular server. I would like to just sever the ties with GoDaddy without going through the process but I'll have to see what my client is willing to do. It's always an adventure!

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