I had this site and several others hosted with GoDaddy. I’ve used them for a little over a decade as recommended by a friend. It was a mistake. First, I don’t like their advertising. They’ve finally figured that out and have stopped using sex to sell, but still, I know that’s who they are. Second, the site was painfully slow. The third and last straw came when they fell well behind in making available updates to the PHP version used in much of my own coding as well as that of a WordPress site like this one. In trying to update it, I kept hitting the walls of their limited platform. Finally I spoke with a support engineer who admitted that I was on a very old server and that I as due to be updated to a newer server at no costs. He couldn’t tell me when that would happen. Pressing further he admitted that over 250,000 sites were on these old servers and they were migrating them as quickly as they could. Meanwhile, some of the tools I used stopped working as they dropped support for old PHP versions.
It took me about five days to migrate the site from GoDaddy to AWS. The biggest challenge with AWS is navigating their nomenclature. As a boater, I should be used to having odd names for everyday things, but Amazon seems to go out of their way to use their own language, and using it in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between technical and marketing terms. Finally, I had it straight-out out using LightSails for WordPress on a Route 53 hosted zone. After several false steps with DNS routing, it works! Hurray! Now, on to the email…..