Some time ago, I tried paying a reseller of GoDaddy.com's hosting services for hosting that provided me with the ability to run PHP scripts. (It's called HostingDude, formerly CompleteOnlineSolutions, which is a subsidiary of Wild West Domains.)
It was $4 per month. (Not much, you might say, but keep in mind that if my ISP didn't block port 80 incoming then I could set up my own server for $0/month.)
At first, it worked fine. Shortly after though, I started noticing a 15 second delay between my requesting a page and its appearing in the browser. I asked their customer service people what was going on. They immediately blamed me and my PHP code. I carefully went over my PHP and improved some things and the delay appeared to go down to 5 seconds--still unacceptable.
Then after a while, they delay went back up to 15 seconds. At some point, I tried accessing a basic HTML file that I had on their server and, lo and behold, the delay was something like 10 seconds.
That's 10 seconds from plain HTML page request in the browser to its appearing in the browser.
I called back and got the runaround, same as before, with them issuing demands that I tell them precisely when it was happening and promising to fix it. When I later offered that information, of course they did nothing about it and I canceled the service.
This was my first experience using a hosting service and it really turned me off.
My question is, what caused this huge delay? Is there a feature of Apache that permits putting a delay in there, or did they just overburden their servers?
Mind you I did ask to be switched to a different server and they refused to allow it.
Then I have a secondary question as to why this happens:
I still have domains with this GoDaddy reseller and I've noticed that every once in a while, their domain masking service spits out an empty HTML file rather than providing the that would show my page-- which is hosted on my ISP's servers for free.
Thanks.