This story is too unbelievable. SO unbelievable that I have to write it out for anyone considering purchasing a hosting package — AVOID GODADDY AT ALL COSTS!!!
They sign you up for little money and bit by bit, they suck you into more and more service for a higher cost, of course. Take email. I know of no other hosting company who charges extra for email accounts. In fact, you can have as many as you want, included with your hosting package everywhere. Not GoDaddy, and it looks like BlueHost (I think) is going to this model, too. I can’t recommend Blue Host, either. (I actually haven’t for a long time. Their servers are too slow.)
Anyway, I have a client who has been with GoDaddy for several years. He has been my client since 2016, and a very nice man who doesn’t really understand anything that’s going on. Tech isn’t his specialty, so why should he, right? That’s my domain. So… Have a seat. I have a story for you
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The GoDaddy Nightmare Before Christmas
I got a text from my client (let’s call him Rob, which isn’t his name, but easy to spell. Ha!), saying that he was on the phone with GoDaddy and asked if I was free so that I could get on the call with him and the tech there. This was the week of Decembver 9; it’s now December 16. I happened to be free, which is unusual, but I was happy to support Rob. So, it seemed that when he got his SSL cert in August of last year (yeah, he was a little late), there were 2 accounts. That was the explanation for his site taking 45 seconds to load. Who knew and WHY? The tech said, “You never went in and deleted the old account.”
Now, how would Rob know to do that, and WHY didn’t GoDaddy do it themselves at the time? I was a little incredulous over that, but OK. I kept my mouth shut.
The GoDaddy tech rep said he could do it. Did we want him to? I saw no reason why not, and Rob said, “Yes.”
That was the beginning of horror. Pure unadulterated horror.
Solutions Lost in Cyberspace
I had created a new page for Rob’s 2020 schedule. It is a complicated page with payment buttons and dates and such. It looked really classy, too. GONE! Completely gone. So, OK. We’re running Divi, and I knew there was a copy of the page in the library. No problem. Just change the payment button codes for 7 dates. No big deal. A little time consuming, but I didn’t rail at that until…
I created a new page, but when I tried to get into the Divi Library to upload the proper page, EhhhhhhHHHH!!! Here’s what I got:
And subsequently…
Hmm… I went in to see what cPanel was doing, and the server account is maxed out:
Is it NOT evident that this is the problem? And isn’t that a tiny Physical Memory amount? I mean,
I couldn’t even go in and completely re-create the page bit by bit, which would suck for me, but at least Rob would have payment buttons. NOPE. Whole lotta nope.
I spoke to EIGHT techs at GoDaddy. EIGHT. I could NOT get them to understand the situation. One woman was helpful and I thought she had fixed the problem, but the minute I got off the phone — CRASH! Of course, I couldn’t get her back on the phone. I got someone new and had to go through the ENTIRE story over and over again with each person I spoke to. Finally, someone bumped me to the next tier of support. This guy got the problem. Finally. He said it would be another $104 a month for the next level of server. Because this is shared hosting, Rob would have to move to a dedicated server. I’m like… “What? Seriously? See you at SiteGround, dude. I’m moving him. I know you just work for GoDaddy, but your employer’s hosting and tech support really SUCKS!”
I felt a little bad. I mean, at this point, I’m yelling. Not this guy’s fault, but he had to take the brunt of my frustration. Somebody had to.
Finding Reamo
I told my client about dedicated hosting but I also told him it didn’t make any sense to do that when SiteGround was a MUCH better alternative. For $5.99 a month for the first year and $19.99 a month thereafter, it was far less expensive. But I was also told by another GoDaddy rep that it was a WordPress issue and that for $99, a WordPress expert could look at the site and fix what was at issue. I gave my client all other information that was collected, and let me tell you… Aside from ONE woman, who got things working, the advice was just garbo.
Oh, and did I tell you that the server was running PHP 5.4 while his site is running PHP 7.2? Yeah… I’m not a server-side person, but it seems incongruous to me. The deal is that my client hadn’t been getting much traffic for years. It picked up a bit lately and GoDaddy had him on a mummified server. If anyone knows about this… Help me out here? Is that a bad thing? Seems to me to be. I could be wrong.
So, Rob didn’t want to make waves. He’s losing money and wants this cleared up ASAP. Of course! But I keep telling him I can’t do anything inside the site right now. He opted for the Band-Aid. He chose the WordPress expert. That was Friday.
Today, I get a message that the problem is malware. Really? Malware? Did they plant it? Of course, they offered their security package for $99 a month and they don’t remove malware in this service Rob just paid $99 for (and found out it was per month when he signed up, not one time). LOL Seriously? I have Wordfence running on this site. I got rid of the malware in about 2 minutes. Then, I ran a scan and checked the error logs. The malware just occurred over the weekend. It as someone in France. Really? I mean, it’s awfully coincidental, isn’t it? Not saying that GoDaddy did anything untoward. It’s just a strange coincidence.
That isn’t the problem at all. Of course, I knew it wasn’t. The server is OUT OF DATE! All of this time I wasted. I mean at least 8 or 10 hours of holding, being on the phone talking to techs that really had no clue, emailing Rob, and still NOTHING WORKS.
Finally… Beautiful Minds
Rob agreed to move the site to SiteGround today. I’m so happy. Yes, to be perfectly transparent. The links here are affiliate links. I get a small perk for clients who sign up with my link (it doesn’t cost them a penny more), but… In this case, I don’t care where he moves. He just needs to get the flock outta GoDaddy hosting. It’s the WORST!
If you’re planning to build a new site, consider SiteGround. It’s stable, inexpensive, and the support is very good. Not like you-know-where. GoDaddy got too big too fast because of TV endorsements and commercials. Some of their servers are so old they should get a gold watch and retire. And their tech support is well… SUB-par. The woman I talked to there told me that not all of their tech reps are up to speed! She’d probably get fired for that, right? I said, “No, duh!” They shouldn’t BE on the phone, supposedly “helping people.”
If you want a good host, try SiteGround.
And protect your sanity!
**This post contains links to a service. When these links are used to buy the service offered, the affiliate will receive monetary consideration from the company mentioned.
