GoDaddy Hosting Wrecked My Website

GoDaddy hosting has just gone straight to the top of my list of hosts to avoid at all costs. It is the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had the misfortune to try.

I’ve been building on this idea for a little while to try extending one of my most popular websites. I want to build a long term sustainable community around it. So in order to facilitate this I needed a domain name and some cheapo hosting, just to get it up and running. The thing is that timing was critical, in order to get the best impact possible I needed to have this ready by the weekend. It is absolutely critical to the early success of the project. I’ve got the content, all I need now is the website to post it to.

So yesterday I registered my chosen domain and went to Google, entered a search for “cheap domain host” and hit return. I got a GoDaddy advert clicked on it, researched some (possibly fake) testimonials and setup a hosting account with them. Why oh why did I search for cheap, school boy error?!

The first thing that pissed me of was the amount of upsell. They tried to flog me everything, including the kitchen sink. Bigger e-mail, secure e-mail, SSL certs, extra domains (I didn’t even register the domain through them), a larger cock and cuddly toys (the last 2 are fake but you get the gist). My scrolly wheel finger was worn out just getting to the bottom of the page where I eventually found the very small “no thanks” link.

Like some mentalist explorer I decided to battle on head first into the blizzard, if I had any sense I would have turned around and gone home to a warm cup of coco. After setting up 2 sets of account details and passwords (1 as my GoDaddy account and 1 for my hosting) I was almost at the point where I could login to the control panel and actually start working, or so I thought. My next problem was actually finding somewhere that I could login, amongst possibly the most jumbly text ridden page I’ve come across there was a small login box hidden in the corner. I put in my hosting account details, failure. I put in my GoDaddy account details, success, woo hoo! Now where is my control panel? The answer of course was nowhere in obvious site. Instead it was more random clicking until I hit the right combination My Account, My Products, Hosting and then eventually clicking my domain name brought me to the control panel. I’m very sorry GoDaddy but at the point where I’ve paid for a service and logged in this is where I expect to see the clean interface. I don’t expect to see dozens of adverts. I want a nice clean intuitive interface that I can use not to know that you are offering 50% of bulk domain registration.

At this point all I wanted was to set the nameservers at my domain registrar and go to bed. Thus started the “Search For The Missing Name Servers”. With EVERY other shared host I’ve ever used, part of the welcome e-mail includes your username, password, ftp details and the nameservers. The GoDaddy welcome letter gives you your overall GoDaddy account details and yet more upsell offers. Fuck Off!!!!!!!!!! I spent 8 hours crawling the web trying to find out what nameservers I needed to use. Every secureserver.net combo I tried got rejected as being old.

I resorted to checking every option in the control panel, eventually throwing a random click at something that filled the screen with “You’re Domain Isn’t Registered With Us, How Dare You, Don’t you Know Who We Are? You’d better contact customer “, or something similar.

I’ve never had any of these problems with any hosts. Even the worst resellers, resellers, reseller hosting setup has at least been able to provide some nice straight forward straight to control panel login details and a couple of nameservers. With GoDaddy I’ve submitted my support ticket but in the meantime setup with another host. It took minutes, there were no problems at all. Everything I need e-mailed to me within an hour of creating an account.

The only trouble is that I’ve lost that time messing around with GoDaddy hosting, it’s put me behind in what was a very time dependent launch. This is going to end up costing me a chunk of money, cheap hosting with GoDaddy? From my experience that is the biggest false economy I’ve managed to date. The lesson here is never do a search with “cheap” in it and never to host with GoDaddy.

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POSTED BY Paul B on Sep 11 under Don't Make Money

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2 Comments so far

godaddy hosting sucks September 12, 2008 2:36 am

that’s what I’m saying dude…check out my little spiel on godaddy webhosting - and that was just my trial with them with the FREE hosting - i knew if the free hosting was bad, the payed hosting would also be terrible~

godaddy hosting sucks’s last blog post..By: fapliaift
mj September 16, 2008 6:28 pm

Google failed you, namecheap is cheaper than goDaddy but I can’t tell you if it’s any better.

mj’s last blog post..Microsoft Buying Yahoo!