GoDaddy.com seems to be pretty popular these days. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m a fan. I find their assorted control panel interfaces chaotic and hard to navigate. I don’t like the spam they sent me all the time until I dug around 3-4 levels deep in navigation to find where to turn it off. And I really don’t like CEO Bob Parsons “How to be successful in business…plus a smoking HOT blonde!” video series.

In spite of all this, I explored the option of moving my friends’ sites to GoDaddy after some disappointing downtime with my current hosting company (Bluehost), because hey, if it’s better, go with it, right? Alas, their shared hosting environment was…icky.

• My applications were using the $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable.  Apparently if you set up a site as a subdomain, GoDaddy puts that variable’s value into a $_SERVER['SUBDOMAIN_DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable (which I don’t think is particularly standard) and leaves the document root blank.
• They also only gave me a public_html folder, whereas Bluehost gives me a level above that, allowing me to store my application code in a non-web folder making it slightly less exploitable.
• They also only gave me two options for the database: accessible remotely with a user with full permissions or not, and no permissions to create my own users. Bluehost allows me to create my own users and restrict remote access by IP address, which is way more secure.

Anyway, I decided to give up, because that was just too much compromise for me…even if their pages do load 2-3 times faster.  :(  Sorry GoDaddy, I’m sticking with Bluehost…you’re not worth it.

I flipped through some stuff today describing different MySQL engines and their pros and cons.  It pretty much just reaffirmed my stance: InnoDB is what I would use in most cases because it supports transactions and foreign keys, but if I had a single table I needed to be fast, I might use MyISAM.  That makes sense, right?  Is there anything else I’m missing?