Support line

I signed up with these people based on a recommendation
There support line has been down for 2 days!
I get email to call the number and I get a "not accepting calls at this time"
I think this firm does not have adequate support resources. I am

Biggest Con: You get what you pay for,,,

Go Daddy -POOR web hosting. Stay away

They show no mercy to me when they kept my site down for 48+ hours. I made 8 phone calls asking for the ETA. Each one would say a different time but the promises were never met.

My visitors were getting error "Forbidden" error.

Speaking to the supervisor, he spoke to me like a cop, asking what did I put on their machine? Heck!! I am getting the hell out of godaddy.com. If you care about uptime and reliability, stay away from GoDaddy.

Guess I was one of the lucky ones.

While I don't technically own the plan, my buddy and I have been hosting at Go Daddy for over a year now. The uptime is great and the speed is pretty quick also. Nothing totally ridiculous, but our site loads up in a little over two seconds on a good high speed connection. The home page of the domain attached queries two separate databases and displays them in a reasonable time with PHP. The guy that funds the operation initially signed up for a Website Tonight (their super-basic web design program) plan which I recommend you all stay away from. They're overpriced and do not offer much storage, something I taught him through example that we needed. Also, they cap the amount of data transfered and do not offer you databases. Those plans are really designed for static HTML pages, which hardly anyone uses anymore. Besides, you can design a better website in Microsoft Word. Go for the raw hosting plan and you should be just fine, especially since they recently released the data cap on all of them! The control panel is easy to use, but a bit redundant between the navigation bar up top and the javascript navigation below. Deleting one of these would make the load a bit lighter.

This is more of a limitation of shared hosting instead of just Go Daddy's shared hosting plans, but I initially wanted to set up a live audio stream via Shoutcast. Well, turns out Go Daddy blocks all the ports except those required by standard website loading (port 25 (or 22, I always forget) for FTP, 80 for standard HTTP access, and 443 for HTTPS, once you install shopping cart software, and the port required for mail serving), for very good security reasons. I also tried their relay servers, but I forgot that the Shoutcast software should probably run on those servers to relay our original feed; and as such, self-hosted Shoutcast is an impossibility. They're pretty big on security too, understandably so. If you call and ask, they won't open up any ports for you or install extra software on their relay servers. They will recommend that you upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting however, without any form of hestitation! Go figure... Free SSH access is always nice.

I have been a "fix issues yourself" guy for quite some time, but the few times I called the support line, I always got good support. They were native English speakers and simple to understand, and phrase things rather simply. I noted above they are sticklers for security. Before you even get help, you have to list off a domain you own as well as your credit card number. Since I don't finance the operation; I was able to scrape by with just listing off a few domains, as more than one are hosted off the same account.

Billing I have a little issue with. I recently found out my partner has yet to point an unused domain to a folder on our server. As a result, he kept paying for a product he never used and never actually had a clue he was not using it. Go Daddy wouldn't tell him. Rolling through the configuration panel helped me figure this out.

Overall it's pretty good for the money. I have seen cheaper hosting plans but many of their customers gripe about support, uptime, not honoring their money-back guarantees, speed, etc. The more "expensive" shared hosting plans were actually on par with these plans, except when you go one or six months at a time. That's when your value goes down the drain. While I'm sure Go Daddy isn't without flaws (the advertising budget, primarily), most of the bad customer support complaints come from the 2008-2009 era. I have yet to encounter bad support.

Biggest Pro: Uptime, reliability, support, speed

Big Name , small service

Godaddy is a huge company, lots of flash and glitter. Unfortunetly they spend allot on crap to advertise their name , rather then passing saving along to the consumer.
Tech support is dismall and knowledge is worse. The response time is so slow that often a person can have a site down two days before even getting started.
And hey you can get a life person, for a long distance fee. this big huge company has no 800.
Total fail. I will leave soon , the company is not what the represent !

Biggest Con: way to confusing to use their site to manage your own.

GoDaddy Shared Hosting Cannot Handle WordPress

(1) I found out after signing up with GoDaddy that its shared hosting has severe problems with MySQL - used by WordPress.

If you want to learn more about this issue below is the link to a WordPress.org thread on GoDaddy's problems. My contributions to the thread are on page 3 under tallreed.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/261977?replies=63

(2) Here some other quibbles I have with GoDaddy (pulled from my post on above thread):

"Lastly, I have had several issues with GoDaddy even before this dealbreaker. I signed up specifically for GoDaddy's PHP 5 and clarified I would get PHP 5 with a representative. After signing up I learned I could not get PHP 5 because they signed me up for grid hosting. So then they signed me up for another 3 months (in addition to the 3 I had just purchased) to make the switch to shared hosting. I have had to call support about half a dozen times at an average wait time of 8 minutes. They are helpful native English speakers but some give the lackadaisical help-guide response and don't appear to know more than I do. I understand this can't be avoided, and would not switch if not for the WP speed dealbreaker."

(3) LASTLY, GoDaddy has no return policy. (I believe GoDaddy says you have to show the problem is on its end for a refund. Good luck getting them to admit that.) This lessens its incentive to provide good service. You are locked in to the contract length.

Biggest Pro: Women in its ads.
Biggest Con: Shared hosting cannot handle WordPress.

Godaddy.com - worst web hosting company!

Godaddy is the worst web hosting company!

BEWARE! Don't get mis-lead by cheap prices... You will end up wasting hours with Godaddy Support!

Cons
- Support people are non technical sales people!
- Any kind of application hosting like ASP.NET OR PHP OR Java is VERY VERY slow
- Technical support or fixes take a very long time
- Support people do not admit issues and not easy to work with
- Support people do not have any technical expertise

Pros
- Godaddy can host static html files...thats it! Do NOT use their service to host any kind web application like ASP.NET, PHP or JAVA

Godady gets NO stars web hosting!

low uptime, high smut-time

Hosted there since before they went all porno, now my website goes down daily, and in place they play their adds. Not exactly what I want. I'm now looking for a new hosting company and leaving canceling my plan.

Go-Daddy Is the worst experience I have had

Yes the telephone technicians are nice to you...but they don't really address the problem, they give some shabby excuse that its not the server etc....The website has been more down than up and I can't easily access it by the backdoor to do my administrative duties. Stay away from godaddy if you want a professionally reliable site

Biggest Con: Unreliable and slow

Horrible service & support, even with friendly technicians

Although their technicians are friendly and helpful within the GoDaddy system, I've abandoned GoDaddy for several very critical reasons:

1. Billing: This company is billing-happy. If you have products you haven't set up nor used, you will continue paying for them until the day you die. Yes, it is dumb to order a product and not use it, but because of GoDaddy's *extremely* spammy interface, you often don't even know what you're ordering or what it's for. I can't tell you how many payments I've found on my credit card's account that I've had to investigate and have cancelled, but the number would be more than 30 (no exaggeration!)—and I'm sick of it.

2. Billing II, The Revenge: Oh, by the way, if you're on some sort of GoDaddy hosting account, make sure your credit card info is up to date. If you're using an expired card number and are on some sort of automated payment plan, and something fails billing, expect it to be cut off *immediately*. No warning, no grace period, no phone call. Of course, if you have one or more useless domain names that you've never hosted or set up, GoDaddy will call you endlessly about those—that's easy for them to do, and lots of extra free money for their company, I'm sure. However, if you have a critical service like web hosting, don't expect a phone call, just a leeetle email that says "oh, by the way, your [insert product name here] failed billing." But nowhere does it say, "by the time you read this, your service will be disconnected"—which is exactly the case. I personally never do this to a customer's website until they're at least 1-3 months past billing, because people do not often think about the web hosting payment, and I don't expect them to be on-time to the very second, getting up at midnight in my timezone to furiously enter their new credit card information before the clock strikes zero. Ridiculous. GoDaddy, this is the major reason I'm leaving you.

3. Senseless Control Panels & Settings: GoDaddy offers you a "wealth" of control panels, special web pages, settings documents and assorted UI nightmares that give you lots of control, but which are impossible to use half the time. Critical functions you might need to access in a pinch (i.e. quick server reboot, instant product renewal payments) are difficult to find and/or strangely semifunctional: often, changing a setting will result in the link being dimmed out with a notice to the effect of "hold on, we're changing this, and we'll get back to you eventually once it's changed". Often, this "eventually" works out to several hours, days or even weeks. Nice. And because they're clearly embarrassed about how long this change takes to migrate through their 8,523,432 lines of web server code in their website, they won't tell you about the projected amount of time a change takes in their support documents (to be fair, yes, some of the more obvious ones like DNS record updates are well-known and are in fact listed, but I've found that the majority of this kind of thing is not). Also, every product, even if it's extremely similar to another type of product, i.e. different types of hosting plans, offer completely different, incompatible interfaces, so you must learn each one individually. Frankly, I'm tired of learning another new, poorly thought-out GoDaddy interface.

4. Abhorrent DMCA Support: Recently, I had a website that I'd designed copied wholesale by (coincidentally) another GoDaddy customer. About a $10K design, and it was so blatant that even the image files had and have my name embedded into them, as well as the name of my father, who actually owns some of the images. To this day, despite legal threats, numerous DMCA complaints, and a letter from my lawyer to GoDaddy, this site is, once again, back online. If someone is shown to have duplicated another user's website, then hey, what the *(&!@# are you doing putting it back online, GoDaddy? This makes me absolutely hate the company more than any other reason listed here. I suppose that this section should be labeled "Great DMCA Support" because there's a legal loophole that allows this to happen, but as as private company, you have the choice to offer good or horrible support, and in my mind (and the mind of approximately 4,000 other customers you'll find with complaints about GoDaddy DMCA problems on Google) this is a huge problem with their service.

5. Domain Transfers: Once you have a domain in GoDaddy's system, never expect to get it out again. They make transferring domains out of their system as complicated and difficult as possible. Plus, they use every legal trick they can to hang on to whatever you've got. If you have a domain registered with them, the best way to transfer it out of their system into a real service that provides actual support—like, say, 1&1 Internet's domain service—is to initiate the transfer 9 or fewer months into the registration. In other words, don't wait until 30 days before it expires, or you will be completely stuck, and forced to reregister with them. There are a list of about 13 other "gotchas" on this subject alone that I'm too tired to express at the moment, because I'm exhausted from dealing with GoDaddy support this morning for over an hour and a half.

Bottom line is, stay way, stay away, stay away. And I'm not a casual reviewer, I'm a multi-award-winning site architect and designer who has created over 380 websites, both huge and small, and I do completely understand what I'm talking about on each of these subjects, so please heed my advice.

Biggest Pro: I get to completely leave GoDaddy within 1 month!
Biggest Con: Everything.

BEWARE Godaddy hosting if you even plan to leave or grow

I had an AWFUL experience with Godaddy. However, I will do my best to write a fair review.

If you are a beginning webmaster of a small website without many images or much need for speed, the shared hosting plan may work for you in the short run. It's certainly cheap.

But proceed with extreme caution should you have any plan to grow your website as a real business in the future or any need to securely backup the contents of your domain, especially if you plan to move to another host in the future.

I did not have any trouble with my shared hosting account on Godaddy, other than slow service at times...until I decided to migrate to a new host. Then, all hell broke loose.

First, I called them to get a full backup of my domain. Since the only way to guarantee a seemless transfer is to have a tar zip file of the entire contents, that is what I requested.

Godaddy does not offer this service with shared hosting accounts. In fact, I found out this is impossible because they stored my database and files on separate servers. (This is practice may cause performance issues, by the way.)

The customer service rep proceeded to walk me through the process of backing up the database and downloading my files through their hosting control manager. However, I couldn't even create a zip archive of all my files, since the maximum size was 20 mb.

I proceeded to transfer my database and files to the new server. It turned out that the database was corrupted due to the way Godaddy stores it on their server. When it was restored, the data was there but it was not accessible. I ended up rebuilding my entire website (with over 80 articles and multiple custom applications) from scratch.

All of this could have been prevented if Godaddy had provided me with a tar zip file containing the contents of my domain. This is a normal request for experienced webmasters, but customer service treated me like I was nuts for requesting it. "No one has ever asked for that before," one rep told me.

Yes, it is true that you receive 24 hour support. But my experience with their support was that they had only entry level experience and were trained to repeat what they were told. They are instructed to focus on the upsell and cross sell, to help you renew any expiring domains, and to get as much money out of you as possible.

I went through 3 levels of management and still could not find satisfaction. They refused to acknowledge that their way of storing my domain was a problem; if any issues arose, they insisted it could only be caused by different directory structure on the new server.

The last rep I spoke to "made an exception" for me and had the server support "do him a favor" by zipping up all my files together. He told me that I could call and ask for him by name (even though I would be told they could not connect me and even managers do not have extensions, Godaddy's policy) but that I could leave him a message. Of course, this made no difference since the database itself was corrupt and unable to be restored.

I believe that Godaddy deliberately stores data on their servers in such a way that it makes transfer to a new domain disastrous for its contents. If you move from their shared hosting to another server you WILL have problems. This is an intentional act that pressures people to stay with them or risk losing their entire domain. For many, it's simply easier to stay.

Godaddy is deceptive and misleading, despite their perky entry level support staff. Just try to navigate their purchasing menus and you'll see how easy it is to accidentally buy one of their "recommended" upsells. The confusing setup is designed to make money by offering suggested options at every level with the "No Thanks" button all but faded out.

The verdict? I strongly suggest that you DO NOT host with Godaddy. The price may be cheap, but the price I paid in sleepless nights and stress-filled days made it way too expensive.

If your website is used for a business or if you wish to protect its contents and preserve them into the future, seek hosting elsewhere with a provider who provides full cpanel backup of your domain. It may be a bit more expensive, but it will save you much pain in the long run.

Biggest Pro: Cheap
Biggest Con: Risk losing your domain upon transfer