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.