If your water heater is struggling here, hard water is the first thing worth ruling out.
Hard water shortens their life
Minerals settle to the bottom of the tank and bake onto the element or the burner surface. That is what causes the popping and rumbling you may have noticed, and it is why heaters in Goose Creek often do not last as long as the label suggests. If an element has been replaced once and failed again, sediment is nearly always the reason.
A lot of local heaters are the same age
Whole neighbourhoods here went up within a few years of each other, so original heaters tend to reach the end of their life around the same time. If your neighbours have been replacing theirs, yours is probably a similar vintage.
What is worth repairing
A thermostat, element, thermocouple or gas valve on a tank under about eight years old is normally worth fixing, and flushing the sediment out often makes a real difference. If the tank itself is leaking rather than a fitting, no repair will hold and we will tell you so plainly.
Worth doing while we are there
Flushing the tank, checking the anode rod and testing the pressure relief valve. In water this hard, those make a genuine difference to how long the heater lasts.