GoDaddy’s Worthless on Rails



I really do hate using my blog to voice negative opinions about products and services, but in certain situations I feel comfortable doing so. I think it’s fair to educate consumers of lessons learned and pitfalls when choosing a particular product. In this case it’s GoDaddy’s Rails hosting. Plain and simple: IT SUCKS.

For the past month I’ve been nursing an Rails app that is running on GoDaddy’s servers. Just do a quick search in this blog for GoDaddy and you’ll see some of the problems I’ve run into. While I’ve fought my way through a lot of the problems to actually get my app running, it has not been a pleasant process. It’s been insanely frustrating to the point of wanting to through my powerbook out the window. My powerbook isn’t even the problem, but it’s not like I can grab hold of GoDaddy’s server and give it a nice kick.

I believe tonight was the final straw. I went through all the steps I’ve mentioned before and ran into a new error message:

[error] [client 68.88.196.202] Directory index forbidden by rule

You’ve got to be frickin’ kidding me. I’ve stumbled across way too many errors to be receiving this one. I did a good amount of investigation to find out other GoDaddy customers were having the same problem, yet there wasn’t a decent solution.

All of this aside I’ve been HIGHLY disappointed with the performance of my app on GoDaddy’s servers (even with FastCGI). I kid you not when a basic page that displays a few records from the database takes over 10 seconds to load. There are several posts on the web about GoDaddy’s horrific Rails performance. I don’t know why they’re even bothering with Rails when it doesn’t seem like they can efficiently manage it. Maybe it’s that they’re loading way to many customers on a single box, hence the cheap plans.

Right now I could really care less and will be looking to move my account ASAP. GoDaddy still rocks for domain registrations, but any Rails hosting is out of the question. I highly recommend looking elsewhere. GoDaddy should be paying me for the amount of time and help I’ve given to others on getting their apps up and running. Maybe I will send them an invoice.

At any rate, if you know of any killer Rails hosts then please post them here. We’ll be doing research over the next couple of weeks and I’m anxious to see what options are available.