GoDaddy vs. Google Compute Engine vs. Turbify

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

You can use Google Cloud Compute Engine as an option to configure your Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps self-hosted runners. This allows full control and management of your runners rather than using the default runners, which you cannot manage. Additionally, they can be used as a workspace, which you can provide to the employees, where they can test their workloads or use them as a local host and then deploy to the actual production-grade instance.

Incentivized

I would tell a colleague to stay clear of Yahoo Web Hosting/Yahoo Small Business. Our business has been with Yahoo due to the fact that there was nothing else around at the time of our signing up with them. Since then there are much better alternatives as the fact that Yahoo has virtually no third party support really hurts it, and the fact that it is so barebones and hard to customize and work in the back end makes it so that you have to find one of the few expensive developers that specialize in Yahoo. This is another huge hurdle if you plan to build a good website.

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

• Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
• Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
• Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs

Incentivized

• Yahoo Web Hosting/Small Business is above else, cheap in pricing at the very least in terms of monthly costs.
• The backend of Yahoo Web Hosting/ Small Business is customizable, assuming you can find one of the few developers that can code for it.
• We were given a dedicated account manager though I believe it was because of how long we were with yahoo and how many complaints we had.

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

• Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
• Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
• Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.

Incentivized

• Extremely old and outdated back end.
• Yahoo Web Hosting is at the very least customizable but everything beyond just running a simple store requires custom work that you will have to pay an expensive developer to fix for you.
• Yahoo Web Hosting is a complete mess in terms of branding and policies. In the span of our last year with them, they went from Yahoo to Yahoo small business to Aabaco and then back to Yahoo and each time were assigned a different account manager.
• Abysmal customer service, every time we had to open a ticket we had a customer service agent in India that could not fix our issue and we were eventually assigned an account manager after numerous complaints.
• Barely any apps or app eco system on Yahoo.
• Frequent down times caused by Yahoo Web Hosting cost our business lots of lost revenue.
• So antiquated and backwards, they were one of the last companies that I know of to switch over to https, we reached out to them several times to switch our website to https and it took an agonizing amount of time for Yahoo to implement it for all their customers.

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

Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.

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

Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.

Incentivized

Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes

Incentivized

It works great all the time except for occasional issues, but overall, I am very happy with the performance. It delivers on the promise it makes and as per the SLAs provided. Networking is great with a premium network, and AZs are also widespread across geographies. Overall, it is a great infra item to have, which you can scale as you want.

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

• The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
• Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.

Incentivized

The customer support for Yahoo Web hosting is a complete disaster. Every call is transferred to a technical support department that is in India which usually isn't an issue as that is the norm for a lot of businesses, however, this technical support team in Yahoo does not know how to diagnose issues or offer support. Every issue we had some, some critical like why is our website down were met with clueless customer support agents that would get back to us in 48 hours minimum. Eventually, we were given an account manager that actually did his best and was able to get to the right people at times for critical issues but it still was a complete hassle and waste of time every time we had any issue with Yahoo Web hosting.

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

Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.

Incentivized

After we departed Yahoo Web hosting we found out that there are numerous much better web hosting platforms, the main we focused on were Shopify, GoDaddy, BigCommerce, and WordPress. Between either is a much better alternative than Yahoo Web hosting as they all have much better third party support, more familiarity in the platforms which means more developers that are familiar with the platforms. Above all else, all three of these companies have stood the test of time and haven't rebranded themselves into different company names like Yahoo did with Aabaco and back and are much better for any small business.

Incentivized

It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.

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

• With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
• As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.

Incentivized

• Yahoo Web Hosting impacted our business in a very negative way with all the time we wasted and revenue we lost.
• Our biggest loss of revenue was deciding to stay longer than we had to with Yahoo Web Hosting as the cost of moving to another platform was high but we had no choice.
• Yahoo Web Hosting constantly interfered with our workflow with its lack of third party support and poor customer service and constant downtimes.
• For instance when we wanted to find an inventory system for our business virtually NO ONE supported Yahoo.

Incentivized