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Godaddy 4GH Hosting review

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.

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Larry Page’s not so impressive CEO debut

Google’s new CEO and his team would have definitely wanted to have a better debut than what was happened on the Quarterly  earnings call.  Like a student coming late to class and giving excuses Page’s excuses and statement looked silly and Childish, combine it with increasing expenditure, market got spooked.

After a brief period in 1998-2000 , Google was run by its founder Larry Page , but with insistence of well wishers and pressure from Investors the CEO role was given to a older Gentleman in Eric Schmidt. Who with support from Page and Brin helped grow the company from a small search engine to its current position.

Instead of taking the lead and taking questions, Page was introduced as a special guest, who doesn’t have much time for the call, who in turn gave a written statement and more than a couple of times reiterated that everything was going as per plan in Google. With the way he approached the call made one wonder if Page took the whole thing  very light,  may be similar to how the  his day at Office prior to CEO days.

Many have described how fun it is to work in Googleplex and how Page runs his business in a casual way, but Wall Street doesn’t run like that. Thats where it was expected someone  would step in and correct Page, it appears either no one did or Page didn’t listen. Even when Schmidt was being replaced there were questions about his CEO skills other than 2 years at Google’s helm for a 100 employees company.

If Larry Page has his way, Google will take more risk, invest more in high tech projects  and take more drastic steps. All these might sound exciting, but with a resurgent Microsoft and Facebook to contend, investors may not feel the same.

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Google’s Panda update kills many Sites

Imagine waking up one day and finding out that the world as you know has crashed,  thats what happened to many publishers, SEO companies and Publications on Monday April 11, thats when Google started rolling out its Panda update globally. Some of the sites have found their way up the results but many others have been hit hard some popular sites have lost 95% of traffic virtually signalling an end to their glory days.

The update was targeted at content farms which have increased in the recent years  details from groceries to Robotics and giving a high level view of many topics. They were the worst hit and there were other sites which had reviews and user contributed information were also affected.

Though Google might have done this to increase customer satisfaction it might raise anti competitive practices over its recent actions. Among the sites impacted was Microsoft Ciao.co.uk  which had filed a case against Google with European Commission for unfair monopoly. And not surprisingly content farms owned by Google like Youtube and Blogspot have seen over 20% increase in traffic due to the Panda update.

Affected in this update include original content sites like British Medical Journal, probably Google will add an exception for a site like this, but there may be many more small vendors,publishers who might have been affected and many of them might not even know the reason for the reduction in their business. With the sudden and widespread nature of this change it makes one wonder whether Google is targeting content farms or if this is one of its Business tactics to bring in more advertisers.