I have been a godaddy hosting customer for nearly 4 years. My sites have been running pretty smoothly with them and have been a happy customer. I have a shared unlimited, Virtual dedicated and 4G hosting with them.
Couple of months back when my unlimited hosting account was getting too many sites I happened to see the new 4G plans in godaddy site. It appeared very enticing, godaddy said they are increasing almost all the parameters for 4GH compared to the existing ones, the number of connections was 4 times the current limit, more memory and more performance was promised albeit some minot inconvenience like missing couple of options like Frontpage server extensions, Java and Cold fusion. For most PHP sites these wont adversely affect, and anyway Java hosting in the shared environment is very bad without a private JVM.
When I tried to upgrade my account to 4G, I couldn’t as I had enabled Java in my account. So purchased a new 4GH deluxe account and chose a Asia pacific server, as the sites I was planning to host were targeted at Indian Subcontinent. So was expecting the setup to be complete in quick time, but my account was not available for next 24 hours.. system was showing that it was still under processing. With my regular shared hosting setup time is usually in minutes not hours.
Said to myself that it must very complicated setup, then switched my first site over to 4G after removing from unlimited shared hosting account. And was waiting and waiting for 12 hours and site had gone completely offline, change of plans and went back to my reliable regular hosting. Raised a incident with godaddy, and put a parking site on the account to see if the issue is getting resolved.
After a day godaddy replied back saying that everything is normal, it usually takes 24-48 hours for hosting to get resolved ???? DNS was pointing to the new server but it was not directly to hosted files. Next day they said the server have so much pending in Queue but everything will get processed. Meanwhile in my Regular shared hosting, it took 1 hour to set up the site and it was back live.
Whereas 4G was still processing my request. Finally got it after 72 hours, and the site speed looked Ok. Later when some of my friends complained the newly setup sites aren’t loading at times, I found that during peak hours the site was crawling and timing out many times. This site itself doesn’t have many visitors, and I had hosted only one site on the account, and it was a plain wordpress blog, the traffic was just 2% of their maximum advertised !!!!.
Without bothering to deal with customer service decided to close account and open a 4GH plan based on a US data center, but the setup still took longer (24-48 hours) and the performance is not all that good. 4GH is definitely slower than godaddy’s regular shared hosting, and the processing time for changes is very frustrating. So the 4GH mostly appears to be a gimmick from godaddy, Im guessing they are trying to reduce their cost by moving customers to cloud based servers and they are not providing a good quality service at that.
Well its early days for the cloud based hosting, where higher availability and scalability are theoretically possible, but it needs to be seen if web hosts are really ready for the switch.