In reply to Justin Tadlock.

Speaking of recent experience...

For years we had a policy at Foliovision that we would not work on sites at GoDaddy and we would refuse to take migration clients who insisted on GoDaddy hosting. We'd heard about this reformed GoDaddy and decided to relax the rules this month.

Our work started with hosting which was down due to badly configured nameservers (GoDaddy had done the configuration and the domains were with GoDaddy). Forty five minutes of live chat later, this issues was fixed a day later. No problem.

When we finally got the site up, functionality went missing. Half an hour of chat later, we found out that a plugin had been disabled. No pro-active notice on plugin removal, just pulled and you're left to find and interrogate chat. While this plugins can take a lot of CPU if misconfigured, when carefully configured, it does not use much CPU.

Yesterday (on Friday), the site just stopped working altogether for reasons unknown. Now (just now) it appears to be up, but with all the images missing. Needless to say, our client is less than happy.

GoDaddy is back on the Foliovision banned hosts list (BlueHost is only on the banned list for high traffic sites).

Justin, I'm surprised that you would be reckless enough to host anything with GoDaddy. You do need high traffic allowances of course which GoDaddy does offer. But with your tech chops, I think you'd be better off with either a Linode or a Digital Ocean VPS. Fo server software, try Litespeed free which allows you up to five virtual hosts for a trouble-free speedy server with a nice GUI to manage the server or VPS version if you want support and more virtual hosts (Apache is slow and maintaining nginx is not worth it for a single server). Linodes are really easy to reboot, upscale/downscale, back up.

If you want really inexpensive US based shared hosting, the best we've found is MDDhosting.com (a small operation out of Indiana with a personal touch). Of the big names with whom we've worked regularly, LiquidWeb has given us less grief than most. Hostroute over here in Europe has been pretty good (ten years and counting). I'm not including any of the expensive Wordpress managed hosts without email right now (WP Engine, Pagely, Synthesis, Kinsta, etc...) as they are in another budget category.

We have been building or working on over two hundred different sites per year on a variety of hosts around the world for the last six or seven years and do considerable testing so our experience is based on a wide variety of platforms.