Amazon Lightsail vs. GoDaddy vs. Volusion

We utilized Amazon Lightsail to get a web application proof of concept up and running. It's easy to set up, requires minimal configuration, and lets us to concentrate on the coding. It's designed to help you get started fast and easily, but it's not designed for corporate applications or workloads.

Incentivized

Good for transferring over an existing site. Truth be told, I haven't used it for building a brand new site-- I know that this is a fairly common thing but I just never needed it. For what I've used it for, it has worked well. For a small business with anyone with a little bit of technical skill, it's surprisingly good.

Incentivized

Volusion is a good company if you're starting out. The problem is that, if you want more complexity out of the program, you're kind of stuck. Also the regular time out errors and slow downs can be very frustrating. Packages that miss overnight deadlines because your system stops working can cost you customers. In today's highly competitive market, that's just something that's hard to put up with. If you have a lower volume of business you might be able to work around these issues.

Incentivized

• Its provide pre configured Apps and operating system
• Very easy to use interface and the cost is also very low
• Integration with other AWS services like route53, S3 etc

Incentivized

• Registering a domain - I've found their site to be the easiest to navigate
• Website builder - their website builder is user friendly
• Email hosting - easy to set up and use, wether in an email app or online email.
• Wordpress hosting - I have multiple wordpress sites I use under one account
• Their customer service is always very helpful and easy to contact.

Incentivized

• Templates are pre-built for a good end user experience. I've gone through the process of building custom sites as well as tweaking both free and paid templates that Volusion's design team provides.
• Their support team didn't use to be as helpful, but in recent years have answered nearly all questions I've had. Their support section within the database provides detailed walkthrus as well.
• Order processing is easy once you've been trained on the system. We got to a point where nearly the entire process was automated from initial purchase through shipping.

Incentivized

• slow
• complex integration to AWS Cloudwatch - complex setup required
• No IPv6, a big downside
• less value compared with Linode or Digital Ocean

Incentivized

• Support agents are woefully undertrained, even in knowledge of their own products.
• Support agents will always try to upsell you, even when you're dealing with an urgent, high-impact issue.
• There's no guarantee of uptime, and there will often be gaps in service as part of normal procedures.

Incentivized

• API calls use the previous call as a reference, even if you weren't the one we made the previous call. Can lead to data gaps, so you often have to set a manual date range to look back to make sure you aren't missing any data.
• Not as customizable as most ecommerce platforms
• Not as many integration options as most platforms

Incentivized

We can't really choose anyone else and the cost/effort of moving all of the hosted data would be extremely large, and we just have to stick to them, and hope they improve service

Incentivized

When you spend so much time with a product like this and not only have you witnessed its growth, but you almost feel like you are next those that make the decisions of building features a certain way, you can't help but want to stay and be a part of their continued growth. It's simply a great product. Can it improve? By all means! But it will only improve because of users and avid resellers like me.

My overall experience with Amazon Lightsail is very good, and the online community of Lightsail users is very large and its helps to resolve any kind of issue i faced on my server. I also like the integration of other AWS services with Amazon Lightsail like we can export our Lightsail instance into ec2 server using snapshots.

Incentivized

Some integration could be much cleaner and smoother. Seems it used to be easier. Plus, they took away the catch all email feature.

Incentivized

I know what to do to add a new product, promotion or do an analysis of sales.

Incentivized

I think a lot of companies can learn from GoDaddy's support team. I have found:

• Chat or phone support is almost always available.
• Their agents are friendly and helpful.
• Their agents seem to care and be knowledgeable about a wide range of issues.
• I rarely have to escalate my problem to get the support that I need.
• If they can't help me, then they can tell me why something is happening and direct me to resources that can fix my problem.

Incentivized

You have to wait on hold for at least 45 minutes every call—the tech support person never knows the answer right away so they put you on 10 minute holds only to come back and say they're still looking for answers. The chat function could take days to get a response. Our "Dedicated Account Manager" never checks in or answers, nor are they ever in the office when we call. It's like they try to be as unavailable as possible until you forget why you even called in the first place. Insane.

Incentivized

It is best to use the built-in features and recommended services for the most turn-key experience (ie. Skipjack for payment processing so that it can all be done from the Volusion backend).

Amazon Lightsail is a great platform. Before we started using it, we were using AWS EC2 instances as our primary servers after being dissatisfied with other providers. After Amazon Lightsail's introduction, we were able to reduce our operating costs, improve our quality assurance tasks, and provide much more efficient and better apps with our microservices architecture.

Incentivized

We use Wix currently for our online store. It is nice and easy to use, but they don't offer the email domains as well (the last time we checked). They have pretty decent customization of the web page, but still limited. We're going to try it with GoDaddy, since we have other services from them already. It just doesn't make sense to pay two different companies for something we can do with one.

Incentivized

While k-eCommerce was very glamorous to us because it integrates with our main workflow, it just didn't have some of the marketing features that are so integral to the way we do business online. The set-up costs were also way too high. Volusion is so affordable and feature heavy, it makes it very difficult for any shopping cart provider to compete. You can find others who are competitively priced and have similar features, but they simply aren't as robust (at least for the way we use it)

• Hosting a production application on Lightsail will guarantee you a loss
• Saved lots of time for our prototyping
• Other VPS providers are better

Incentivized

• GoDaddy reduces our ROI by costing me in non-billable hours. I don't charge clients for sitting on the phone with tech support to power cycle the server or fix the php.ini file, so my $/hr takes a hit.
• Their nickel&dime strategy requires I have an additional conversation with clients about their max recurring fees. Small as they are, I need approval for upping their bill. GoDaddy is only the cheap option if you don't value security, stability, or performance.

Incentivized

• Honestly, when you're in the dashboard, the UX is simply horrendous. I mean, everything that should be 1-2 clicks away is 4-6 clicks away, and each pages takes at least four seconds to load. You just find yourself wasting a lot of time waiting for things to load. This should be more simple.