If you’re looking for a UK or EU based solution for hosting multiple WordPress sites then save yourself a huge headache and avoid Go Daddy’s new EU hosting plan.
The 2 major problems:
- The multiple locations, random selection, unwanted site migration and undisclosable details of the EU Data Centres
- The preview DNS functionality for domains you have not transferred to them
The Data Centers
Go Daddy have hosting set up in multiple datacenters dotted around Europe to support their EU expansion.
The problem is that you cannot choose which one your hosting account is allocated to. It’s chosen at random based on usage levels at the time of creation.
I created a plan and was assigned to one in Holland. This is useless for us hosting sites for UK based companies who have non country specific TLD’s and need the benefit of location based hosting to assist in their SERPs.
I asked to be moved to the UK datacentre instead and was told that customer services cannot manually decide where your account is allocated and they could not disclose whether there was even a data centre in the UK in their network.
Next problem, even if you get extremely lucky and do get hosted in a preferred location when you add a Secure Certificate to your site (you get one free with some plans) your account gets moved to another data centre which is again chosen randomly.
Even if you are not fussy about the actual location of the hosting and just want your sites to be faster for European visitors in general, your still going to have lots of fun…
The “Hosting” Account
Even though none of the 3 hosting plans are specifically designed to be used as reseller accounts they all offer multiple, if not unlimited, domains, ftp users, one click installs, etc just as you would expect.
Perfect for hosting multiple WordPress sites? No.
The fun begins when you create a new hosting account for a domain you have not yet transfered to Go Daddy, which if you’re building sites for a client with an existing site hosted elsewhere that has to stay live until you’ve finished development is going to happen regularly.
You set up your hosting for www.domain.com and install WordPress. Now you want to preview the site so you have to activate a Preview DNS function for the domain and you are given a temporary URL that you can use until you transfer the domain to Go Daddy.
The other problem is that WordPress creates the database relative to the domain you set the hosting up on. So when you view your site on preview.domain.com WordPress can’t find the files because it’s looking for them on www.domain.com .Which hasn’t been transferred yet. And you can’t use the preview domain in WordPress because it doesn’t really exist and can’t be created prior to creating the hosting account…
The other problem is that even if you figure out a solution to the above, Javascript and Flash are not supported on the preview domain for security. How much fun will it be trying to preview your site without at least Javascript working given most plugins rely on it to work?
Has anyone else encountered this problem? Did you find a workaround or did you give up? Who did you choose instead?
Much has been said about GoDaddy and its reputation, but more and more people still voice their frustrations about GoDaddy. Well I guess it does come with the inevitably useless and incompetent technical support that seems to come with many hosting services these days.
Hi Kris, I actually find the support by Dreamhost to be incredible. They respond quickly, have never failed to provide a solution yet, they often implement fixes for you rather than just detail what you need to do yourself and now they also have live chat support for instant help. I honestly don’t think their support team can be outdone. If only they would open up a UK data center
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