Apr 5, 2014

Why I Can No Longer Recommend GoDaddy Hosting

Let me start this off by saying that this is utterly and entirely a rant against GoDaddy.  I fully understand that there are plenty of people who like them, have had no issues with them, and would recommend them to everyone.  I am not posting this to begin a debate, or to get any concessions from GoDaddy, but only and solely to rant about the total lack of customer service I have received from their Hosting services.

I have been a GoDaddy domain customer for many many years - pretty much as long as I have been doing websites.  Their domain name services have always been great - it's not something you can mess up easily, really.  A couple years ago, after experiencing a lot of downtime and other issues with the hosting provider I was using, I decided to move my sites to GoDaddy hosting - they had a pretty good list of features, their reviews looked good ... okay, off we went.

Almost two weeks ago, a friend and I started putting together an auction, hosted by REGAP, to help another friend with her vet bills (more info here and here if you want to help!!).  The auction launched on Sunday and ran for several days with no issues.  All of a sudden on Thursday ... nothing would load.

That's when the whole thing went south.  I have compiled screenshots of my support tickets with GoDaddy, my frustration posted on their Facebook page, and the support I received from my new hosting provider (all linked below).  Boiled down ... the software we use for the auction uses a particular coding convention in their links.  There's a little file on most servers that automatically blocks that coding convention, which means that the links stop working.  Most hosting providers have no problem removing that block if the web designer asks them to - GoDaddy apparently does.

My main problem with GoDaddy's "support" is that there simply wasn't any for several days.  There was no response on the ticket at all - not even a "We've gotten your ticket, we're looking into it, please be patient".  What really ticked me off tho, and what made me wait so long to finally respond to them and write this post, was the scripted, canned reply that I did finally get.  Plain and simple, GoDaddy took 5 days to copy and paste some text into a response and ask for a bunch of information I had already provided.  In the meantime, I had spent most of my weekend frantically backing up, downloading, and relocating my websites to a new host who, in turn took only three and a half hours to research and remove the block that was causing all the trouble (I didn't count the lag time between my own responses - only the time their support people took).

While I think I have every right to be angry, I also do understand that GoDaddy is a business and much of their support decisions are based on what's best for their company.  One little non-profit greyhound adoption group is small potatoes compared to, say, an online business that does national sales.  REGAP doesn't use the site for daily income but for social connections and a public face. In the end, what it boils down to for me is a bit of a hassle while I relocate my websites (REGAP being the largest and therefore will be the last), and a few drops added to the bucket of bad press for GoDaddy, which you can find on a simple Google search.  Now I wish I had listened to all of that.


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