Over the past 3 months we have essentially stress tested a GoDaddy 4GH hosting account beyond what would ever be considered acceptable use! Let me state this upfront our utilization case was a special one, and not what I would recommend anyone else do without permission. We did this “with permission” from GoDaddy as part of their sponsorship for CES 2012. I wanted to prove how good or bad GoDaddy 4GH service really was. Our use case was beyond what would be considered acceptable use on any hosting service!
The end goal was to serve our CES media fast and stay online with no down time. We knew our utilization would be “considered a worse case scenario for any web site hosting provider“.
We proved over a 90 days that a GoDaddy 4GH hosting account can ramp up automatically when needed and sustain “extremely” high traffic loads, extremely “long persistent media connections” and handle “outrageous bandwidth usage”.
Here is what we subjected a $9.99 per month hosting account to: We uploaded 350 video media files ranging in size from 250mb to 2gb in size. We then linked that media to as many as 6 external sites including Geek News Central, Fortune 500 sites that were covered in the content, cross-linked back to this same media adding more load. That media was also served to Google TV, Samsung Smart TV, Roku, Boxee, iTunes, Zune Market Place and was accessed by over 160 different media devices over the 90 day period.
Our biggest traffic day we served over 400,000 video views, and “many terabytes” of data .We kept track of site up time, with 5 separate tracking and data download performance services. Over the test period, GoDaddy maintained 100% up time, we did have data downloads slow down during some peak periods, but all videos played back at real time with little or no buffering.
I will be honest, I was worried that the the 4GH hosting would survive the load, as we had destroyed a not to be named vendor in 2011 who said they could handle the traffic load. Some of you are going to say that GoDaddy did something special. After direct discussions with lead engineers at Godaddy, who are engineers first and not marketing guys. I am confident that we got a fair shake on a standard 4GH account, although I am pretty sure there was some nail biting on their end, because we where watching the traffic wondering ourselves if we would melt down some servers.
I am confident enough in telling you this story, that if you go a buy a GoDaddy 4gh hosting account, you are going to be very happy with the service. As a disclaimer here, GoDaddy has been a sponsor of this website for a long time, this site is hosted on a “dedicated” GoDaddy server that I pay for and independently maintain, I do not host the media on this server as it could not possibly handle the volume I move daily.
I have always been objective in reviewing GoDaddy services laying out concerns where appropriate, and knew their was considerable risk in serving all of our CES 2012 media from a $9.99 per month 4gh hosting account which is not normally subjected to such punishment with their permission we did so and I am very pleased with the results.
You can be assured, when you put up family videos, pictures, or even the rare video that goes viral the 4Gh service is not going to fall over. It will scale as the demand needs, and includes a long list of features that lead the industry. I will let you review all the features on your own at the GoDaddy site. In closing let me congratulate the GoDaddy 4GH team on surviving our extreme use case!
Disclaimer: What we did in this test case was Extreme and with GoDaddy permission! While I have not read the Terms of Use of a 4gh account, I would suspect that what we did would be way beyond acceptable use of a $9.99 per month hosting account. Which is why I am confident to reveal what we did here to any and all readers of this article as very few people are in a position to do what we did in the manner we did it.
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Todd Cochrane
Executive Producer
Geek News Central
