Thanks in advance for any insights anyone can share!

Let me say right up front that I was really excited to find C5 last year after long searching for a CMS that was designer friendly. I love the interface and how easy it is to use for my clients. I have designed 2 sites so far using C5:

The first site has been kind of a disaster. I had the design before I found C5 so I had to figure out how to recreate my layout with the various add-ons, etc. I dove right in and found the css files for the add-ons I needed to tweak beyond the basic settings available in the block's dialog box. Anyway, when the client signed off on the project, it was functioning fine, although a bit slow which I've since found out is because it is hosted at Godaddy.

Then, about a month ago, the client went to the site to edit it for the first time and the site was unavailable...just an error message where the site used to be. I was able to figure out that the 5.6 install was causing it and got things running again and re-installed 5.6. Things were back in order.

A couple weeks ago, I was in the site doing some maintenance and updated one of the add-ons that was requesting to be updated and suddenly my home page layout was totally screwed up.

Then yesterday, the site would not load at all with the Internal Sever Error message which I discovered is also due to Godaddy....I got it at least working again with a line of code some one had supplied in the forum (Thanks!!)

The second site has gone smoothly so far. It is also slow, but not as slow. It is hosted at Lunar Pages. I also tried to not customize any of the add-ons, just use the settings available in Edit. But this is a real limit in the long run....

In light of my experience so far several questions have been raised:

1. Both of my C5 sites are slow. Slower than I am used to. Most of the time I am stuck with the web host that my client is already hosted with. Many of them use Godaddy. I am really reluctant to use C5 with Godaddy hosting. Does anyone have any performance tips to speed things up? Who are the best inexpensive hosts for C5 sites?

2. Customizing Add-ons. I learned the hard way that there is a correct way to customize add-ons. I wish this was spelled out right up front as a warning to excited ignorant designers such as myself. I have not been able to find a clear tutorial of how to customize add-ons. What are the basic best practices for customizing add-on blocks?

3. typography.css. Based on the tutorials for creating a theme, I thought that the styles I created in my typography.css file would show up in the rich text editor. But no.....in fact I had to figure out how to get anything beyond H3 to show up. How do I give my clients access to the styles that I create? Howe do I get my styles to show up in the Styles drop-down of the rich text editor? If I create a style in the C5 interface, where are they stored?

I understand that most of my problems are due to my inexperience with C5. I'm hoping your answers will point me in the right directions for help.

Thanks!