My year of GoDaddy hosting, which cost me about $93 if I recall correctly, expires on February 23rd. I will be transitioning Bingo Card Creator from GoDaddy hosting to one of my Slicehost VPSes slightly before that happens.
This is not a rejection of GoDaddy so much as it is just a natural growth in where the site is going. I am integrating the Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Card sites, and am planning on doing some serious Rails-based work on the main site itself, starting with some backend improvements (conversion tracking the way Google should be doing it, for starters — “first click wins” not “last click wins”) and a few automated marketing experiments. As a result, I have no further need for shared hosting, and want my $7 a month back. ;)
One thing that gave me pause about doing this was an email disruption. Happily, I was able to transfer email providing from GoDaddy to Google Apps for Domains without much hassle. It took about 20 minutes to set up, all told. Now I get to use the Gmail interface I know and (mostly) love with my @bingocardcreator.com addresses. Hopefully Google will also end improve the deliverability of the emails, although since setting up an SPF record for my site and e-junkie I have had much, much less of a problem with that.
Another thing which I’ll have to think about is whether my $20 a month Slicehost slice can take an increase in traffic by a factor of about 10 (immediately) and then some fairly rapid growth after Google gives Bingo Card Creator’s link juice and domain trust to the Daily Bingo Card cards. I’m pretty sure it can, but will be serving key pages as static HTML until I know that traffic spikes won’t bring the whole business to its knees.
Sidenote: for those starting uISVs looking for hosting, I think GoDaddy is an excellent choice. I think in 18 months there I’ve had one serious problem (unexplained corruption of the trial executable EXE, on and off, for two weeks) and one additional minor outage, which happened in the middle of the night and lasted for a few minutes.
