The GoDaddy Experience
wreck below the cliffs lands end by lovestruck
Over the last couple of years I’ve been migrating my domains away from GoDaddy because they’ve received quite a bit of negative press relating to poor customer service and arbitrary site takedowns. There are still a handful of domains that I have with GoDaddy though, and yesterday I was shocked into moving them away as well.
The domain for Claire’s site, loobylu.com was set to expire yesterday, and it was set to auto-renew. When GoDaddy attempted to auto-renew it though, the credit card transaction was declined. They sent me an email letting me know this, and when I got it I went to their site, put in the details for another card, and renewed it directly.
I later found out though that for the 9 hours between when the auto-renew transaction failed and when I renewed it manually, GoDaddy had modified the DNS settings for the domain so that people visiting Claire’s site landed on GoDaddy parking page full of advertisments, indicating that the domain was now for sale. Because it was a DNS flip, some people are still seeing the parking page. I’m still kind of stunned at that behavior, and I hope the promotion and adsense clicks they got from showing their landing page make up for the fact that I won’t be using them again, ever.
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Hello there,
I have been using Go Daddy for a couple of years now because it is cheap and I have not run into any real problems but I do not know a lot about web programming…could you recommend another company that is close in cost that you are happy with?
Thank you.
Hi Leigh,
I have some hosting with Dreamhost and they have a domain registration service, so I use them most of the time now; they charge a dollar more than GoDaddy, but they provide a private registrant service as part of the basic service, which GoDaddy charges extra for.
I too have had lots of problems with GoDaddy. POP3 email outages and website having intermittent outages primarily… until last month.
I went to show a friend my website last month on his computer, and immediately got a virus alert. I tried a couple of other of my sub-domains, and got virus alerts on them too.
When I got home, all of my index.html pages in every directory and subdirectories on my hosted domain had a back-door trojan infector imbedded in them. I uploaded the files again, and put in a ticket with GoDaddy.
They claimed the files were uploaded by http://FTP. However, they closed multiple tickets for me requesting the upload date, and the IP address of origin. I still think it was an inside job because the ONLY files that were modified were index.html files. And one of the files in a subdirectory is not even used anymore - hyperlinks on my pages do not link to it.
Needless to say, I am currently investigating another hosting service. Funny how they have all this money to advertise, and even sponsor the Indy 500, but seem to be completely shady!
I second those comments! GoDaddy is appalling in terms of customer service and I’ve told them this only to receive a banal reply “we’re sorry you feel that way..feel free to call our service number…” which, of course, is implausible calling from Australia.
I have since moved to Bluehost. I pay US$7 a month for hosting and with this received a free domain/upgrade. They’re very good.
But I so agree: ditch GoDaddy. They spend more on their racing cars than they do on their business.