I always recommend people stay away from GoDaddy when they’re looking for shared hosting. It’s not their primary business and they have way too many customers. The result is packed, locked down servers missing key features, and poor support from inexperienced technicians.

But at least they didn’t bungle up the VPS product like 1&1 did. Some of you might have seen my rant last night (now hidden) as I wasted hours trying to get the VPS I bought from them configured. It came with Fedora 4 x64, which isn’t a bad operating system to run a web app, but it was missing standard packages the OS comes with, notably any type of package manager. Attempting to compile either resulted in a non-working binary or running out of memory during the build process. When I finally made my way to upgrading MySQL, Plesk broke. PHP refused to load the mysqli extension. Ugh.

While it took half a day from ordering until they set up the VPS and gave me the login details, what I got from GoDaddy was much better to work with. CentOS 4.5, with everything I’d expect it to have. Enable the centosplus repository, type “yum update” and “yum install subversion”, and I’ve got the latest version of PHP, MySQL, and Subversion.. everything I need to run W3Counter. Note that upgrading those 3 pieces alone requires downloading and installing 55 separate RPMs and you’ll see why doing it without a package manager would be a nightmare.

The GoDaddy server is more crowded. I can tell from watching the memory usage. But I’ve got 256MB dedicated to my VPS which I hope is enough for a single large account. Now I can do my testing.