A prospective customer wrote us that he was offered a 'screeming deal' on GoDaddy for $7 per month. Would we still be able to support his site there? Here's what I wrote back...

If you choose to host your site at GoDaddy, we'll be of very limited help to you. They really don't do a good job of Joomla hosting, see: http://www.joomlahostingreviews.com/ where GoDaddy ranks near the bottom of the heap.

Also they're notorious for security breaches. See such tales of woe as: http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/05/13/hosting-with-godaddy-might-want-to-rethink-that-decision/. You can google for literally thousands of others.

In short, they don't have the tools or apparently the inclination to really do a good job of hosting dynamic websites like Joomla or
Wordpress.

Also consider: would you really be saving money? As an example, this week a security patch for Joomla came out: 1.5.21. I installed it on all our sites automatically with no charge to our customers. If you were to be hosted at GoDaddy, I'd have to do a special one-of update for your site that would take me about a half hour. With my billing rate, you've just lost a number of months of savings that 'screaming deal' bought you.

It's your choice, but if you do go with GoDaddy, we'll not be able to offer the level of support we like to provide and that we think you and your site deserve.

That's where I ended the letter, so I didn't even get into such things as site performance enhancements we provide by tweeking the Apache webserver configurations, regular database integrity monitoring, backing Joomla sites up the right way (both files and database at the same time), intelligent database, joomla and php caching, etc. The long and short of it is: not all hosting providers are created equal and not many really understand how to host Joomla.