GoDaddy Hosting Review
I’m sure you’re wondering why the hell I would be using GoDaddy in the first place, since they are notoriously awful. Well, I was helping a friend with his business website that happened to be on a GoDaddy shared hosting account. Seeing as how all I needed to do was install WordPress on a subdomain and put the blog there, I figured not much could go wrong.
To save myself some time, I decided to use their auto-install. Anyone who has ever used Fantastico! or any similar script to install software on their sites knows it is usually quick and painless. Well, apparently this simple job is a 10 man operation over at GoDaddy that takes several days to complete.
I will now post a screenshot of my correspondence with a couple different GoDaddy representatives on Twitter. I had to do a little copy + pasting to get them in the correct order and everything, but I assure you these have not been altered in any way.
I have several different hosting accounts with many providers, and I can honestly say this is the worst and most incompetent support I have ever received. Even foreign hosts that oversell their boxes and don’t even offer phone support would be able to take care of something as simple as this with a ticket submission.
And another thing that sucks about their support – the hold music. Yeah, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies were cool for like a week in like 1998 or something. Yes, there is an option to hold without music, but guess what? Their support never has any idea how to resolve your problem, so they put you on hold again. WITH MUSIC.
Anyway, for domains there is Namecheap. For hosting, there are more options than you could ever possibly sift through. If you are that 1% of my readers who don’t already avoid them, this post is for you. Stay away from GoDaddy. And feel free to link to this post with some GoDaddy hosting type anchor text so that my few days of frustration will not have been in vein.
Just in case you were wondering, GoDaddy never made any attempt to offer any sort of service solution. Too bad. I was hoping for a .CO registration coupon code for 3% off.
Add 1and1 and DreamHost (who I refer to as Nightmare Host) to the list. However, at least with these two hosting providers, the main problem that arises is that it takes forever to have a database created — not so much in the case of GoDaddy where they have to handle everything on their end.
…anyways, without a doubt StableHost and HawkHost are my favorites and offer painless setup, 1-click installation, etc.
I had a terrible experience with them too. It was pretty much for the same reason (client using them)I hadn’t used them yet and thought “I mean, really, a corporation this big,how bad could they be?” They’re pretty bad. That shared hosting account would take around 10 seconds to load (If I was lucky)which of course is terrible for a site for seo and user experience but also a giant headache when you’re working on the back end (luckily, I bill by the hour
)Every time I contacted them about it I would get a “everything looks fine on our end” crap. I thought about threatening them with the “I’m moving my business if you don’t move me to a faster server” but in the end, I realized I just didn’t want to deal with them anymore so I convinced the client to move to Bluehost and we haven’t had a problem since.
I don’t have a Bluehost account but I’ve worked on the same friend’s personal site which is hosted with them and have never had any problems whatsoever. +1 for Bluehost.
Yep I’ve had many nightmares with em also… Incompetent is putting it nicely…
I signed up with Godaddy first, then I went online and read reviews. I read awful reviews and I was terrified when I went to configure it with wordpress.org
Maybe since I was expecting the worst, it didn’t seem that bad. Everything has been smooth sailing ever since. I haven’t had to deal with customer service, hope I don’t have to.
Now trying to get a custom header on a wordpress them – that took 2 freaking days!!
GoDaddy has really stepped up the incompetence in the last year. I’m a business client to them, a reseller for nearly 10 years with over a thousand recurring hosting customers, nearly another thousand incidental (ie. non-renewing) customers per year and many thousands of domains either in my own portfolio or those of my reseller front’s platform; as a result, over the years I’ve become accustomed to being in nearly constant contact with GD support and seeing changes (for better or worse) all the time … but in the last year it’s just turned into a joke.
Although I really adore having support tickets ignored, and enjoyed having my account exectutive of several years transferred and replaced with a person who wanted me to send him ID in order to get service on my account (due to the age of the account and size of the operation, there are a number of people who might theoretically contact them for support on the account, including some who no longer work for me; this confusion led my new AX to accuse me of fraudulently trying to access my own account) … setting that aside, I think my favourite part was when they changed the setup of their call center, so now whenever anyone calls the number on my site, the call is routed through the GD switchboard — ie. you call the number on Atlantis Domains and the phone is answered by a machine which says “Thank you for calling GoDaddy.” This change was never announced or explained in any way. A close second was a customer of mine who had domains with us, and with a few other registrars, including GoDaddy, who wanted to transfer all of her domains into her Atlantis account. She had no problem doing so with any other registrar, but _my_own_ call center — provided by GoDaddy — told her there was “no need” to transfer her domains, and refused to help her despite the fact that she understood that we are a GoDaddy/WildWest reseller.
Just crazy, and despite the running joke that GD’s retail service is, up until the last year their reseller service has been top-notch. For the hundreds of dollars a year I’m paying GoDaddy (to say nothing of the tens of thousands of dollars in revenue my site generates annualy) I could just pay a midget to punch me in the nuts once quarterly, and get about the same result as I feel like I’m getting from GoDaddy.
Frank
Frank, why would you want to contact GoDaddy? They contact me on their own all the time. Usually to let me know how much I can save by buying more hosting. Haha. Thanks for the comment.