I had talked to a Godaddy representative before purchasing my hosting services. I specifically described the amount of traffic I tend to get per day and per month and wanted their confirmation that their hosting service would be able to accommodate it. They assured me the Economy $3.99/month package would be more than enough, so I bought 3 years of service because it was the better deal.
Nope. I just called them and they said my hosting only allows 200 people on the site at any one time, and when it hits that the site will crash and be down for the day. TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE. That’s fucking nothing. I have thousands of blog readers. And I’m a BLOG. All of my traffic comes in spikes – every time I make a post people come to the site all at once, and then I have lower traffic at other times. But they want me to pay $250/month for a dedicated server, which is more than 10% of my salary. If it was $250 a year I’d just spend it, and if it was $1000 a year I may beg all of you for some money, but Jesus fucking Christ.
So now because they lied to me I’m out the money I originally spent on hosting, I wasted a week of my time coding a site that is unusable, I botched the big exciting announcement about my new blog, and I have no idea what to do.
Fuck it all.
Edit: Well, overnight I was flooded with cheap hosting alternatives, which brightened my day. Even though it would be a pain in the ass to switch, for a moment there I thought hosting my own blog would be an impossibility. I tweeted as much.
Five minutes later I have an email from GoDaddy saying they gave me a free year of Business Level WordPress hosting, which is about $250 a year (…curiously the same price that I wrote here that I’d be willing to pay, hrm). Then five minutes later I get a phone call from a GoDaddy rep who explains that they’re giving me that year on a server that can easily handle my site for free, and they’d also reimburse me what I originally paid. So I decided to go for it…for now.
I don’t exactly have the highest confidence in them right now, but maybe they’ll prove me wrong over the next year. The fact that I gave details about my blog traffic and even explicitly asked if I should get the WordPress package, I was still led to the totally wrong thing. Then the next guy tries to upsell me to some absurdly expensive private server? He also told me I could get a full refund up until 45 days, but the latest guy said even that was wrong and it was only 5 days. What is going on over there?
Anyway, I’m just glad this is resolved. Back to the fun part of blogging…getting the comment code to work!
webfaction.com is what I use – that much needed middle ground. Much better than very cheap shitty shared hosting and not a full blown VPS.
Give them a call – I suspect what they offer will meet your needs.
You should be able to use the coding work you’ve already put in.
Good luck!
And they start at $10/month.
Your fans want to see your site come back! Surely to the FSM there’s somebody better than that company. Please hang in there or hang in here!
I used 1and1 for several years when I ran a blog. It was $4/mo at the time and $10/yr for a domain, and handled massive (20k+ hit) spikes without a problem and without ever getting near the limits. All your work should transfer easily enough to the new hosting.
As for the money you’re out, try issuing a charge back on your credit card. If you have documentation where you clearly specified what you needed and that they said it would be fine, followed by proof that it doesn’t work and they tried to upsell you then you should succeed.
I am super excited about you blogging again, I hope this doesn’t ruin things forever!
Godaddy really sucks. I’ve never spoken to anyone who had good things to say about them.
Damnit Godaddy! Why!
The suggestions here seem to be really. I wish I could offer advice of my own, and I’m so sorry I can’t.
That said, please don’t let it put you off blogging for good, and don’t let it get you down. For so many reasons Godaddy sucks. There has to be better options out there.
For the record, your site is very slow, but I am connecting.
You hadn’t heard about Godaddy?
Put it this way: their service is much better than their politics…
Relax, while there are a lot of of shitty hosts there are a lot of fairly priced ones as well. Spend an afternoon researching and you will find one. And if it is using the same cms all your work will be usable. Most good suppliers use all the major ones.
GoDaddy tech support is horrific. I still can’t believe how incompetently they handled a site restoration for some acquaintances of mine. I won’t go into the long and tedious details, but it took me hours to straighten out their screw ups. Afterwards, I swore that I would never, ever do business with that company again. Ugh.
On the assumption that you’re looking for another host, I’d be happy to recommend QWKnet. Their techies have been unfailingly helpful and responsive.
Goddammit that fucking blows. If they refuse to reimburse you, definitely refuse to give them any business and, whatever hosting service you ultimately go with, make sure you have a page explaining your experience with Godaddy and why your readers should avoid them as well.
Fuck them.
I am really sorry to hear about this… I’ll read you wherever you end up, Jen!
A quick tip: GoDaddy blocks domain transfers during the first sixty days by default. As the article explains, though, there’s a way to un-block your domain before the time limit.
Just out of curiosity, I looked at GoDaddy’s sales terms for web hosting. Even the economy plan offers “unlimited bandwidth,” but only for their super-secret and purely arbetrary definition of “unlimited.” From the fine print, revealed only hovering over a link elsewhere on the page:
This really sounds like bait-and-switch: the sales clerk flat-out lied to you and never bothered to define “unlimited” in any way that reflected their reality.
Wow, that sucks. Things like that always make me nervous to spend more than zero dollars on a product or service from a company I haven’t done so with before. (At least with companies I’ve had prior dealings with I can go ahead and expect it to be terrible.)
I bought a new computer recently, only to find out it doesn’t come with the ability to connect to the internet wirelessly. Of course, that was actually my fault, no one actually lied in that case, I just didn’t pay close enough attention. Because I always leap before I realize that I just leapt over an active volcano.
Anyway, it may look super crummy now, but after a good night’s sleep maybe you’ll feel better to tackle the problem. I know that’s usually how it works for me. And then in a couple weeks you’ll look back on this and it’ll still look super crummy. Welp.
HI Jen,
I’m the new head of Hosting at GoDaddy and I’m sorry you had this experience. In this case our support team steered you wrong, you don’t need a dedicated server, we have very fast, very scalable WordPress Managed hosting for about $6/month. I’d like to personally get involved and help you get your (very cool) blog rolling asap. Please ping me at the email I submitted to your blog & I’ll take care of you.
BTW, to respond to the other comments, I understand the sentiment from the past, but there is a lot changing at GoDaddy. Blake, our new CEO did an AMA a few days ago that is worth a scan. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/23v7f3/hi_im_blake_irving_i_am_the_ceo_of_godaddy_ask_me/
@Gregory in Seattle:
Many of the uber-cheap hosting companies do the same thing – unfortunately it isn’t just GoDaddy. For most people with simple personal or business site, this isn’t a problem. The poor uptime or slow response of the sites with so many crammed into a server is something I’m sure most people don’t even observe.
I used a website monitor to reveal the poor uptime of my shared host and looked for a long time before I found and moved to webfaction.com. I have had zero downtime in the last 4 months compared with many minutes downtime in Nov/Dec before I moved.
PZ among others helped to stress-test Jen’s new digs and it was found wanting. Remember when FTB was being set up – the first couple of weeks weren’t very good here either for exactly the same reason – the load was too great for the hosting that was in use at the time.
Gregory: It’s not the bandwidth that’s the problem from GoDaddy’s perspective, if it’s a blog it’s dynamically generated, and it’s probably maxing out the CPU and/or memory and causing latency for everyone on the shared hosting plan on that server. If it were just serving videos and images on disk, the CPU isn’t much involved, and so they probably can offer a very high version of unlimited in that area.
If you’re still looking to jump ship, I use ICDSoft for my incredibly low volume, static-file-only vanity site … so double-check the terms. OTOH, I did look at several before I picked it (several years ago). Hope this helps, but it probably won’t.
GoDaddy sucks and their marketing is for assholes. I’m sorry to hear you were completely misled and poorly treated. Then again, some reps are worse than others as well, and don’t listen to the customer or understand their own damn service.
What. The. Hell.
I just went to Jenome and it worked fine for me. I am so sorry you got jerked around by GoDaddy. I hope you find a new really good host as soon as possible, and I heartily second the advice to refuse the charge with your credit card company. I wish you well. You certainly deserve all the best.
Well, how about that? I was considering buying some hosting, and was going with GoDaddy… until now. Not only have they screwed you over, but I bet you only got a decent response from Jeff because you already have a large platform to complain from.
Furthermore, I have now heard so many terrible things about them that I cant believe I was considering them in the first place!
Jen – we are hosted at Inmotion hosting – http://www.inmotionhosting.com/ – and have found them to be affordable, reliable and helpful. Even a dedicated server is only $120/mo and I doubt you need that much power.
Check them out — and very happy to see you blogging again!
Cheers… Jim
Did you pay with a credit card? Call the credit card company and do a charge back for breach of contract. or sue go daddy in small claims court, most states it is only a $25 fee. I’m sorry that go daddy screwed you over, I’m looking forward do your new blogging endeavors when ever you get up and running again.
Try DreamHost, they are relatively inexpensive and appear to have good customer service. http://www.dreamhost.com/web-hosting/
At this site DreamHost has spelled out their unlimited policy .
http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited-policy/
The last part of their policy is:
But our pledge to you is to do our best to always keep your website, with the content youcreated, UP… no matter how many times you get Slashdotted, Reddited, or win the DHSOTM!
Seconding DreamHost. They host my site and I’ve been really happy with them. I should say, I can’t speak to how well they handle traffic stress, as I don’t even have a real website configured. (I’m mostly using them for source code and data repository hosting. Getting undergrads to submit work on your project is much easier when they can just push a button and send it to a server!) But I believe blogs of reasonable audience size are a fairly typical use of the standard DreamHost package. It does sound like it would be a little more expensive than what GoDaddy was offering. (DreamHost is $9/mo, I think.) But I’ve found them to be helpful and responsive, and their regular newsletter is actually entertaining to read.
I’ll admit I have a bit of a beef with GoDaddy as a company as well. Their extremely sexist advertising campaign was enough to put me off them for good — I understand that marketers gonna market, but GoDaddy’s ads were really beyond the pale for me. There’s also the recent incident in which they released Skepchick Jamie’s personal information to a harasser: http://skepchick.org/2014/04/godaddy-released-my-personal-information-to-a-spammer-troll/ . I hope Jeff King is right that things are changing there, but it’s definitely a company with a bad recent history. If they can make things right with you that’s great, and probably at this point your path of least resistance to getting your site up. But if it were me, I’d seriously consider switching hosts if possible.
Anyway, good luck getting this worked out. If you decide to switch hosts, I expect you’ll probably be able to port the code you spent a week on without too much work. I’m looking forward to seeing the Jenome get up and running at full speed, but I can wait a little longer!
FWIW, Jamie over at SkepChick also describes a less than stellar experience with GoDaddy:
http://skepchick.org/2014/04/godaddy-released-my-personal-information-to-a-spammer-troll
I don’t blog, but if I did, I don’t think I’d use GoDaddy after all the stuff I’ve heard.
BTW, I’ve heard that WordPress hosts blogs & sites — are they any good?
Good to see from the update that GoDaddy are trying to make things right.
I agree that switching hosts would be a pain – wasted time more than anything.
Glad to hear that things seem to be fixed for now, with a measure of compensation. Honestly, it would be nice if they are reorganizing their company into something better.
Somewhat as an aside from this, I find that almost any business that acts as a domain name registrar, I feel like I can trust them almost as far as I could comfortably spit them. Something about that business, all the way back to the super-cushy original handover to private corporations, is wrong.And it seems like the smaller guys, practically resellers, if you will, seem to do things like site hosting as an afterthought, even if it really has become their main income.
GoDaddy is a horrible company.
Shady practices (regarding reserving names people have searched on)
Sexist ads, the founder Bob Parsons is a pig… major GOP contributor. Parsons wrote a blog post advocating torture, etc.
Go with DreamHost. I’ve been using them 5 years without a hitch. I know it’s a bitch to switch, but …
As my domains reach expiration, I migrate them from GodAddy to Hover. Hover has a nice simple interface without the obnoxiousness that we’ve come to expect from GodAddy.
@Jafafa Hots –
I’m the head of Product Management at GoDaddy. I’ve actually looked into the belief that the system buys domains that users search for and can tell you that it doesn’t happen. I had an engineer run through the code to make 100% sure that this isn’t happening… and it doesn’t. All urban myth.
We’ve had a new CEO since Jan 2013, Blake Irving. and he’s been pretty actively working to make the company a good citizen of the Internet community and things like the GoDaddy ads you mentioned are a thing of the past.
Here are some examples:
Blake’s AMA on Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/23v7f3/hi_im_blake_irving_i_am_the_ceo_of_godaddy_ask_me
Commercials and content:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgH_SmWw9WianYyOB5Y6tEA
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