I am convinced that the most common abusive relationship is the one between a consumer and a technology company. Here’s my take on GoDaddy.
Need support? Here’s a sale pitch.
I recently had a problem. CloudFlare was dealing with some pretty intense DDOS action, and my podcast’s website (alansmitheereview.com) was knocked out. The nameservers weren’t resolving, and all I needed to do was redirect them to my hosting service’s default name servers to solve the issue. The problem is that before they made that recommendation, the support tech led me down the path to hosting and domain renewal, with automated backups and malware scanning. I readily agreed to all of this, because while I can deal with all of that stuff myself, I don’t really want to invest the time and energy.
My problem isn’t that there was a sales pitch.
My problem was that the sales pitch needed to be concluded before GoDaddy’s “scan of my website” would complete.
Why would you agree to that?
Well, for what it’s worth, now that my complaining is out of the way, GoDaddy has actually been pretty good to me. I’ve hosted my websites on their plans for the past seventeen years. Better yet, I have upgraded my hosting for the first time in twelve years. Sure, all the bells and whistles cost me $500 for two years of service, but at least now I’ve bought some peace of mind.
I should also say that I’m super glad I did upgrade, because my old plan was locked into PHP 5.3 (which is ancient), was processed through a potato, and served up each one and zero individually. The new hosting is much faster, and the whole debacle meant I had to rebuild the site from scratch. That may sound bad, but it meant I took the time to refresh the look and install some additional functionality.
I’m confused, are you pro- or anti-GoDaddy?
I’m neutral. Their product is good, their service has a glaring problem, and sometimes their prices are competitive. I will say that struggling through the sales pitch rewarded me with a 40% discount on the whole kit and kaboodle, so I’m not really complaining. Therefore, the real pro tip from this article is that you should call them if you want to do business with GoDaddy, you might save some money!
I’m not a huge fan of GoDaddy, I find them to be a little on the expensive side. That said, I like to do things myself and on the cheap a lot, so that’s probably has something to do with it.
I used to use GoDaddy exclusively, then I moved off to Namecheap after one of the first bills that GoDaddy supposedly got behind in the early stages of the Net Neutrality war. Also, Namecheap came recommended by a good friend. I never really had a problem with their service though, it seemed to work flawlessly. Now that I am using web hosting though, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. DreamHost has this “magical” script that randomly kills my blog processes off because they are “using too much RAM”. What they don’t know is that the permissions on some of their atop files on the server are not set right, and I can see what my processes (and others) are using. Mine are normally using nothing compared to the others. Going back and forth with them has proven useless as they just keep suggesting that I need to move to a VPS. Oh wow. </rant>.. haha. Anyways, back on topic. Nice post!
Haha… as I was submitting this comment, the CPU load on the server spiked to 85…. Just entered a snarky ticket with DreamHost. It made me feel better anyway.