Please don't host with GoDaddy for your own sake

[Benchtech]

I, and many others on the internet have had the worse experience in the world with GoDaddy and I want to save you the misfortune of paying into a contact which is awful.

I like many others faithfully bought GoDaddy hosting a while ago in good faith that for my money I would get a reasonable quality of hosting, I bought the most expensive shared hosting package that they offer which is always advertised as fast, and powerful, how wrong could I be, how wrong could I be! I bought cloud hosting meaning that the loads for my website should be spread out over multiple servers to stop my site being slow, from the first site load the speed was god damn awful, the servers could hardly handle one user loading a Wordpress php file and it took around 10 seconds to even display a page, naturally I put this down to it being a new site and continued to bare the speed.

It then came to installing my SSL certificate, I filled in all the details they needed and they said it would be installed within the next 72 hours, I patiently waited and at 48 hours I could see that there was no sign of any changes, I called them up to advise them of this, 'No Sir, I can assure you it will be done within 72 hours'. 72 hours later still nothing. I began to get really impatient as you cannot even use your hosting control panel when the certificate is being installed, I called them up and was assured that it would be installed within the next 2 hours, I waited a further 12 hours and then called them up again, I was then told I would have to wait another 72 hours by their crap customer support.

After it was finally installed I thought I could finally get on with what I wanted to do with the hosting, my website. I made my website and still noticed the slowest loading speeds in the world, my users were complaining at how slow it was and that they were waiting 10+ seconds to begin even loading the site. I thought 'hey! No problem I can use their award winning support that they advertise'. I sent in my message and sent in a ticket explaining how it was nothing to do with the site and was THEIR servers, what do I get back? An automated response. It was evident that they did not even read my ticket and just sent an automated response with tips on how to speed up my website, I sent in more and more tickets and they did the same thing, they send back automated responses and then in the end try and blame it on my site saying 'PHP is intensive'.

I wouldn't mind if I had loads of users, but when I am the only person on my site I experience awful loading times, sometimes it is faster than other times which should not happen on so called 'cloud hosing'.

I beg of you not to use GoDaddy, I never had any of these problems with hosts such as 1and1, before you suggest it's my internet connection I can assure you that it is not, other sites loads lightning fast and mine is consistently slow. I am now putting it through cloud flare to try and squeeze some speed out before my contract is up, but please do not use them.

GoDaddy, do not reply to this message, I have seen you respond to these before claiming it is some abnormal thing that should not be happeneing and never does usually happen, you can stick your PR posts where the sun does not shine, I've had enough of you, you've robbed me.

 

[miles01110]

Post your sob story on your blog.

 

[Benchtech]

Post your sob story on your blog.

It's not a sob story, it's to help people who are going to get ripped off. I suppose your so far up your own backside you wouldn't know that.

 

[miles01110]

It's not a sob story, it's to help people who are going to get ripped off. I suppose your so far up your own backside you wouldn't know that.

Plenty of people have problems with GoDaddy and for a number of different reasons. Plenty of others have no issues at all. I have had ups and downs and the customer service really depends on who you talk to.

In other words, you're going with the lowest common denominator web hosting provider. Set your expectations accordingly.

 

[waloshin]

Why do you need an SSL certificate for your site?

You should be running compression such as gzip.

You should have php5-fastcgi enabled.

You should be running caching software on your wordpress blog.

Walla.

 

[Benchtech]

Why do you need an SSL certificate for your site?

You should be running compression such as gzip.

You should have php5-fastcgi enabled.

You should be running caching software on your wordpress blog.

Walla.

Thought I would give the users the option, I don't use it or actively promote it but it came for free so I installed it anyway.

I am running compression, caching and php5-fastcgi, on top of that I use cookieless domains and a CDN, it is still slow.

 

[musty345]

GoDaddy, do not reply to this message, I have seen you respond to these before claiming it is some abnormal thing that should not be happeneing and never does usually happen, you can stick your PR posts where the sun does not shine, I've had enough of you, you've robbed me.

I've had the same experience with their customer service, they just send automated responses or copy and paste a generic answer which isn't specific to your problem and doesn't help.

It sort of reminds me of how an old teacher of mine used to write our school reports, first he'd decide if you were good, bad or OK. Then he'd copy and paste a long essay and substitute our names in it. When we opened our reports, we used to laugh at how many people would have exactly the same report, save their name. I didn't really care back then, but if you're paying for a product you should definitely get better customer service.

They've also made a complete mess of my email which I don't have the will to explain right now, but put it this way, I would have been much better off using my free gmail/iCloud email address. I now have to resend ~50 emails.

I get the impression that you switched host after this incident, would you mind telling me who you switched to, and how good they are?

 

[ericrwalker]

No problems here with when I hosted with GoDaddy, though I didn't have a lot of users beside some friends and family. Their customer service was helpful and I paid up front for 3 years of web hosting and cancelled (to host on my own server) with over 2 years remaining and they returned my money for the unused time.

Plus I am a big fan of Bob Parsons.

 

[OutThere]

In my first foray into Drupal, I put a stock install on a new client's existing GoDaddy shared account. It was nearly unusably slow, so I did a little digging around to figure out what might have been the problem, well I discovered it. The load average on the 4-core server the site was hosted on never dropped below 20. All day. Every day. All week. Often it went over 100. I don't know how it wasn't catching fire or otherwise becoming totally inoperable.

I tested the same exact install on a shared hosting plan with A Small Orange and it was night and day--Drupal was executing in a tiny fraction of the time. GoDaddy oversells their servers to a ridiculous degree. There must have been an outrageous number of sites hosted on a very inadequate server.

Here are the load averages, and before and after execution times for the same page on each host:

 

[AFPoster]

Just because you and many others have issues doesn't mean the other millions of users do as well. I've had GoDaddy for several years now with multiple sites, hosting servers and exchange with no issues.

Define many others as well? Are these people you know or just saw posting a rant on some forum. I assume and no offense that it's just hear-say not actual people you know.

 

[fig]

I've never hosted with GoDaddy but simply having to help others make modifications to GoDaddy hosted sites was enough to make sure I would never make the mistake of hosting with them.

Besides, why host with a huge multinational corporation who doesn't give a flip about you when there are scores of small hosting companies out there who pride themselves in excellent customer service and charge competitive prices?

 

[Benjamin,]

GoDaddy have a rubbish customer support, but any and all experienced web developers love them for their price and features. If you want customer support go to a more expensive company.

 

[stevelam]

totally agree. i used to used godaddy for hosting/domains but have since moved on.

 

[fig]

GoDaddy have a rubbish customer support, but any and all experienced web developers love them for their price and features.

Um, no we don't.

 

[Nikomanz]

i use go daddy hosting and domains services, no problem so far, and their support always helped me, even at the beginning with really noob questions they would always respond with a personal manner and help me with my problems, loading time of my site <3.2 seconds

 

[moderniste]

Godaddy will always try to get people to pay years in advance. Every two years or so, they "upgrade" their hosting and sites on the "old" plans will start to slow down and break. The fix of course is to move to the new plan, preferably paying another three years in advance. More reputable hosts will include these kinds of upgrades without making you pay for a more expensive plan. They also sell odd email plans that practically nobody needs, let alone should pay for.

Every time I've had to call godaddy on behalf of my clients, they are always friendly and polite, but they can't always fix the problems in a timely manner. They will never admit fault if a site is slow. If you're a casual blogger, maybe it's not a big deal. If you're running a high-traffic e-commerce site that loses money every day because of server issues, it's a headache. Not to mention, their servers have been hacked time and time again. Database-heavy sites running on Drupal or Joomla are particularly slow on Godaddy.

Godaddy is probably fine for simple blogs and small sites, but if your income depends on your website, just about any other host is a better choice.

 

[DJLC]

GoDaddy is awful. For everything. Always.

 

[Cheffy Dave]

No Problems

My business has been with GD since the start, in 2004, never had a problem

 

[TonyK]

...They've also made a complete mess of my email which I don't have the will to explain right now, but put it this way, I would have been much better off using my free gmail/iCloud email address. I now have to resend ~50 emails.
...

Yes, GoDaddy's email is junk. I use GoogleApps and do not have an issue now. It took very little configuration on my part and now I can send and receive emails against my domain name.

Godaddy will always try to get people to pay years in advance. Every two years or so, they "upgrade" their hosting and sites on the "old" plans will start to slow down and break. The fix of course is to move to the new plan, preferably paying another three years in advance. More reputable hosts will include these kinds of upgrades without making you pay for a more expensive plan. They also sell odd email plans that practically nobody needs, let alone should pay for.

Every time I've had to call godaddy on behalf of my clients, they are always friendly and polite, but they can't always fix the problems in a timely manner. They will never admit fault if a site is slow. If you're a casual blogger, maybe it's not a big deal. If you're running a high-traffic e-commerce site that loses money every day because of server issues, it's a headache. Not to mention, their servers have been hacked time and time again. Database-heavy sites running on Drupal or Joomla are particularly slow on Godaddy.

Godaddy is probably fine for simple blogs and small sites, but if your income depends on your website, just about any other host is a better choice.

I would agree with the statements here. Once they pulled an update and broke my site. I argued with them about the site working correctly prior to their update and not after their update. Finally guilt-ed them in to fixing their problem. Sure I could have fixed it but I am also a big believer in making the person who broke something fix it. It is how they are going to learn.

I've looked at other hosting sites and domain registers. For price and features, for my limited needs, GoDaddy is the best fit. Does not mean I like them or will recommend them. Frankly I dislike their CEO and if I could quickly and easily move I probably would. As it stands, GoDaddy's reputation for domain transfers is awful and painful.

To the OP, I just checked my site and it is running acceptable fast. I use WordPress installed locally on my domain/hosting plan and it too was reasonably fast. Have you used any tools to identify performance issues potentially in the PHP code? Are there any DB connections and have those been checked? Finally what version of PHP is being used?

Take care,

 

[bluemonkeyguy]

Do people have issues with the domain name aspect of GoDaddy, because I only use it for a domain name. I'm too scared to pull the hosting trigger because of all the horror stories.

 

[Albright]

Well, as TonyK mentioned above, there are stories circulating about Go Daddy making life difficult when you try to move your domain registration to another registrar, but with perseverance it can be done.

But here's an idea; just for fun, the next time you need to register a domain name, try Namecheap (my personal fave) or some other registrar. You'll probably pay a little more, but maybe you'll actually rather like not being assaulted with skeevy marketing and hard upsell tactics at every click. (That's not to say that Namecheap doesn't try to upsell you; they just don't do it so aggressively or offensively.) Then, when your older domains come up for renewal on Go Daddy, the decision on whether to transfer to the other registrar rather than re-up with Go Daddy will probably be pretty clear. Or if, on the other hand, you find yourself still thinking that Go Daddy is good enough, you can transfer the new domain name to your Go Daddy account and be even more reassured about your decision to stick with them.

(Trivia: The actual name of the company is "Go Daddy," with the space, though they may as well change their name to "GoDaddy" since it's what everyone calls them anyway.)

 

[ixodes]

I was referred to Go Daddy by an associate four years ago. I've experienced the same excellent service as they have. I'm really shocked to hear all this complaining. I've always enjoyed fast courteous communication & they've never tried to upsell.

I believe the title of this thread is extreme and very unreasonable.

No one is perfect. I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to have a problem. It's just that I currently have five separate accounts with them, all of which are just over four years old, and I am very satisfied.

In fact I migrated to Go Daddy from another hosting company that was in fact quite poor. That's why I sought out referrals, since I needed to get it done as soon as possible and had an urgent need for reliability.

Go Daddy not only has met all my needs, but being so satisfied I too have referred others & none of us have anything but good things to say. Another thing that just came to mind, I didn't even bother shop price, my business covers expenses, so in my case it was about reliability.

 

[Albright]

You certainly saw the upselling, even if you didn't recognize it as such. A previous employer used Go Daddy for domains and I was sometimes tasked with buying them on the company card. I remember there were always two screens of offers for web hosting, email hosting, or "you're registering a .com domain name, so why not also grab the .cm domain? Or .info? Or .name?" offers that you had to "not interested" your way through to make a purchase. (Granted, this was a few years ago, but I doubt they've changed their tune since then.)

As for their services satisfying your expectations…*okay, fair enough. Different folks will have different expectations, and perhaps yours are such that you've never "hit the wall" with what is possible with a Go Daddy hosting account. But the wall is there, and it's not fun to hit, especially when you have to work with a boss or client who thinks Go Daddy is just the greatest thing.

 

[McRCN]

I've been using GoDaddy for a decade for my business websites and email, and I have not had any real issues to complain about. I am a happy customer.

 

[dopey220]

I used GoDaddy for both hosting and domain registry for several years, but I recently severed my ties with them. I actually never had any problem with the service. It was because I find Bob Parsons to be a morally reprehensible dickbucket.

[self-righteous rant over]