Not sure if that title is too overstated or too understated. From where I stand right now, I feel like I should have an auto playing audio track screaming ‘NEVER EVER EVER EVER USE GODADDY FOR ANYTHING’ that yells at everyone who visits our site. In fact, we might just make it a company policy that we don’t accept people on Go Daddy’s hosting or Go Daddy’s domain registry.
Why?
How do I count the ways.
Let’s start with the very basic service of hosting. GoDaddy is cheap, but not that cheap. For shared hosting, dedicated hosting, etc you can easily find other companies that are competitive with their pricing. What baffles me is how they manage to run so many advertisements year round (and in the Super Bowl). At the rate at which they market, you’d assume hosting was 90% profit margins and the actual costs associated with it were minimal. Based on what I’ve seen of most data centers, that’s not the case. There is a huge hardware cost, huge power cost, and a lot of technician time that should be dedicated to operating a big hosting operation.
Of course, if the experience of my client today on a dedicated server recommended by a GoDaddy tech (or sales person) is any example, they obviously are running at a 90% profit margin, skipping the upgrades or investment in their hardware, and aren’t bothering with much actual technical support (personally, I think GoDaddy is actually all sales people and Danica Patrick, with not a single technical mind in attendance). As a result of their server, the site crashed repeatedly during a major promotional event. Based on the server specs, this shouldn’t be happening, so it tells me that this server / hosting was particularly poor. Of course that wasn’t in the sales pitch. Now if this was an extreme scenario, I probably wouldn’t be here, but I’ve seen more than one GoDaddy shared / dedicated / managed server take a dive on a shadow punch. Its extremely frustrating to have my theory proven correct (that they don’t actually spend their money on customer service, tech support, or hardware).
Next up we’ve got basic follow through. We had a customer order an SSL certificate with Go Daddy for their newly launched ecommerce site. What did Go Daddy provide? Rather than a 1 year long cert, the client received a 1 day long certificate. Brilliant Go Daddy! And then they tried arguing with them about the cost of getting the problem corrected.
Beyond that, we see constant issues with shared hosting being behind the curve in terms of software / hardware performance, or unannounced changes in server configuration that impact site performance.
GoDaddy is close to the worst hosting company ever, in my opinion. Based on the experience with our clients, I wouldn’t put my worst enemy on it.
