Godaddy is a leader in Domain Name providers on the Internet today. They provide probably the cheapest Domain Name Registration Services out there. Also provided with Domain name registration is DNS hosting. This means that you do not have to pay extra to go in and change say an MX record or your websites A record.

The bad thing about using Godaddy to find domains you might be interested in is that if you don’t buy the domain that is availble right away, Godaddy might snap it up, register it for themselves and put it for sale at a huge premium.

Case in point: I wanted to register a new domain name for doing some consulting work here in Toronto. I checked out a bunch of domains similar to : TorontoITconsult.com which I ended  up registering. Another domain I was considering was TorontoITconsulting.com . That domain is no longer availible. Was registered 1 day after I registered my domain and is on sale now for $850. (By Godaddy nonetheless)

Lesson to learn: Don’t use Godaddy to search for avalible domain names if you dont want to purchase them right away.

As indicated in an earlier blog post, I was having bandwidth issues with Godaddy’s dedicated servers.

An outline of the problem so far: Godaddy claims the server should have access to 100mbit of bandwidth. Even in a busy datacentre I would expect atleast 10mbit acheiveble bandwith on this connection.

Speed tests done at the server show that its more like a residential cable/dsl connection with downloads in the range of 2mbits and upload in the range of 400 kbits.

They call this a dedicated server and assure you that they have redundant network connections, great uptime, dedicated bandwidth. etc. They sell you a maximum of 2000 Gb / month of transfer per server.

Showing the 2mbits connection sustained over a one month period:

2mbits/sec x 1 mB/8 mbits x 1 GB / 1024mB x 1 min/60 sec x 1 hour/60 min x 1 day/24 hours x 1 month/30 days

This gives a grand total of : 632 GB /month.

Anyone with any experience with servers knows that it is not possible to sustain any connection at 100 % saturation for extended periods of time.

I would be interested in knowing if any Godaddy dedicated server users are able to push more than 500 GB of data per month.

Getting back to the original problem, Godaddy claimed to have increased the port speed to 100 mbits after a support ticket request. No change in speed was realized though.

Came across this today after several days of back and forth with their customer support department to increase port speed on a dedicated server. Very frustrating as the customer support staff didnt know the port speed could be increased, and we didnt realize we were being capped at 10 mbps. (Thought it was due to Godaddy’s crappy Network overselling).

Have requested 100 mbps now, will see what the results are.

PS: the 10mbps maxed out at 2mbps for some reason.

Dave wrote:
Dedicated Hosting servers are on high speed, redundant networks, connected to our access switches at 100 Mbps. There is a policy on them that limits bandwidth leaving your server to 10 Mbps. This is a safety valve, for your convenience. For most customers, keeps them from grossly overrunning their bandwidth limit in case of a break out. For most, 10 Mbps is an adequate speed to host several web sites. If you need the full 100 Mbps, ask, our level 2 customer support staff can change you to a 20 Mbps policy or unleash you at 100 Mbps.

The performance of the Core 2 Duo systems is very good. It’s plenty of horsepower for the needs of our customers.
However, there is an untapped market for high end, like Xeon, and other goodies like private networks and load balancing. We’re investigating this exciting avenue with our market analysts and engineers.

Dave.

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