One of the nice things about GoDaddy’s brand new Managed WordPress hosting is the integration. Not only is it WordPress designed to scale to the millions-of-pages-per-month, but it’s tightly integrated into GoDaddy’s domain and DNS offerings. So tightly, I decided to see how fast I could get a production blog up and running.
As I’ve tweeted and tweeted about, I’m a big fan of Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs). I parked bifuelimpala.com the day General Motors announced the first bi-fuel car to launch stateside in over ten years. With the discovery that America has the world’s largest fuel stockpile (thanks to all the natural gas underneath all that frackable material), the time for NGVs to take off in America is right now.
So, I signed on to GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting panel, and chose make a new WordPress site. I was immediately given a list of domains to choose from, and chose bifuelimpala.com. From there, I entered my username and password of choice… and hit go.
Five minutes later, and a DNS cache clearing, bifuelimpala.com was live and on the web. No one-click-installer, no configuring WordPress, nada. I had a working website faster than it would normally take to string up the A records in Amazon Route 53.
Granted, you could argue that a shared hosting service with a typical one click installer would have been just as fast. But, people choose to go through the pains of Managed WordPress hosting, because of its speed and scale benefits. That means having different domain and host providers, and often times, different DNS and email providers too. This is a pain point that Pressable and WP Engine have, until now, had a simple answer to – you get what you pay for — in both time and money.
Now, is GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress perfect? Hardly – it’s only about 72 hours old. It’s clearly the new kid on the block. I’ll be using it over the next month, and currently plan to move all my accounts over to it. The price is hard to argue with – $69.99/month for up to 25 sites and “millions and millions of page views” – While GoDaddy doesn’t give specific page caps and bandwidth caps, comparable plans at Pressable and WP Engine that go anywhere near GoDaddy’s minimums are into the three figures. Pressable quoted me $180/month, at least, to have a similar plan under their new we’re-venture-backed-time-to-raise-prices rates.
I’ll keep you posted, but guess what? You’re using it right now as a reader. This site is (as of this posting), hosted on GoDaddy Managed WordPress.
Thanks for your write-up. I run the team behind GoDaddy Managed WordPress and would love your feedback.
Please let me know if there is anything we can help with.
If your only concern is inexpensive hosting for WordPress you might be in the right place.
However as somebody with 60 accounts with different hosting providers. I would like to think I know quite a bit about what the best deal for your money is.
When one of your websites gets hacked (hopefully this will not happen obviously) you do not have Sucuri built-in you do not even know if your sites is full of malware right now all do you?
I apologize but DynECT DNS what Pressable & Pagely offer standard. Starts at USD200 a month for their enterprise plan.
Pagely has unlimited page views now if that is what you care about.
When you look at what you are getting for the money is it the fastest hosting no you are not on the fastest hosting by any means.
Is it the most secure no you are not the most secure hosting.
Do you have a very low bill yes you do.
I would have paid double and stayed with quality over a system that frankly is the Go Daddy of managed WordPress hosting.
I respect that you are making your choice but let us get real your servers are not as high quality your entire set up is not as quick or as secure.
These are the main reasons why we use managed WordPress hosting.
All the best,
Tom
Most downtime I’ve had with GoDaddy since switching was for about 30 minutes last week. That’s the only outage I’m aware of since January – and it was load based (my Kickstarter campaign trended to #1 worldwide). I’ve been very happy with GoDaddy.
The migration tool could use some work – if it errors out you’re left with front-line support. I have a few sites that I haven’t migrated yet due to laziness because the migration tool just failed… and doing it manually I haven’t the time for.
GoDaddy has built out features as promised. There’s now web admin one-click rollback (so no need for VaultPress backups), and everything just works. GoDaddy has the GoDaddy of Managed WordPress hosting now. It’s a good new standard for the competition.