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

20 countries will not see your site !!!

My First host provider Was Godaddy.
the reason to use it was the ability to pay them monthly.
I shocked when i knew that visitors from Syria, Iran, Sudan, north Korea, Mozambique ..etc unable to access my web site.!! i discovered it by coincidence when a friend from syria were unable to access my website. i went to Google analytic and it said that there were just 20 visitors cam from these countries. i searched for that issue and i found article confirmed that. !! and you will find that now in godaddy tos.
if you have business in middle east it will be destroyed by godaddy and you will not discover that unless you have a (terrorist) friend.!!!!!
then i went to ixwebhosting and it is very very bad and i am searching now for a new host respecting their customers.

Go Daddy sucks!

After renewing for several years with Go Daddy, I was stunned that my "new" renewal rate was about $40 for one year. No way, Jose. I went through all sorts of crap trying to move my domain name to another host. It seemed like they were trying to make it as difficult as possible. I finally was able to change to domainsite.com, where I have another web site hosted. $9.95 per year. I still keep getting all sorts of spam from Go Daddy, despite the fact that I've emailed them several times, asking them to remove me from their email list, and telling them that the only thing they're accomplishing is to annoy me to the max.

In addition, Go Daddy's web site is so cluttered with junk that it's difficult to find what you want. I'm glad to be rid of them. Never again!

Biggest Con: They don't tell you that your renewal fee will increase BIG TIME!

Good is probably the best word

I've been with GoDaddy for the past year and am overall pleased with them. Initially I had a problem with my webpage not loading but after firing a few emails at them everything was sorted and now my webpage is fast and has never been down. However, their web interface is TERRIBLE and I mean Sony sonicstage type terrible! It's slow, confusing and a plain mess, but once you found what you want it works well enough; it's just a pain finding what you want. I like GoDaddy, especially for my small private site and they're relatively cheap too.

Biggest Pro: Fast
Biggest Con: Awful user interface

A terrible experience

My first 6 sites went well even though the interface is almost unusable and filled with GoDaddy ads and promos.

This last experience has been extremely unpleasant and I plan to remove all my sites from GoDaddy as soon as they expire.

Despite promises from customer service and their website that my new site would be ready within 24 hours it is still not ready to use four days later.

They promise me and I promised my customer. Now my customer wants to know where his site is and I can't give him a good answer. It's costing him money. It's costing me my cred with a valuable customer and I am super ticked off.

Poor to say the least.

Gave the repeated proof that their infrastructure was blocking my network and multiple others from being able to view my website and they repetitively denied it with completely unintelligent responses.

For example:
They tell me I need to optimize my websites code so it will run faster when I can't connect the website via the BROWSER or FTP. How again exactly do you optimize code in order to login via FTP.

More information:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r23275891-Connectivity-Comcast-Not-blocking-Godaddy-site

Honestly. Avoid like the plague.

Biggest Pro: cheap... but getting more expensive
Biggest Con: Support, speed, downtime

Stick with host that works

I had been with GoDaddy for years but left to find a host with more features. Big mistake. Spent a year going from one to the other before finding a horrible host, (hostnine - I have reviewed them on this site). I am now back with GoDaddy and probably won't move again. They are reliable and have great uptime. They do have their faults, but believe me when I tell you that they aren't nearly as bad as some of the other popular hosts. They give a lot for a little, and I've never had major problems with them.

Biggest Pro: Good price, great uptime
Biggest Con: not enough email storage space or MySql databases

Their Spam Logic Makes No Sense!

I have been using GoDaddy to host my simple email needs for 2 years.

I do not have a website - I purchased my domain names in order to have my own permanent email addresses.

Their Spam setting consist of what to do if they decide an email is spam - move it to the Bulk Folder or leave it in the Inbox with [SPAM] inserted at start of Subject Line

If you want to download your emails from the server to you local pc, I would suggest you select the second option -that way you can check the emails they treated as Spam for accuracy.

As an example of their poorly designed system and bad support that I have seen over the 2 years....

Yesterday I received 2 emails from the same sender, about 2 hours apart.

The first email was marked Nonspam - IP Whitelist but when the second email was processed, it was treated as Spam -Statistical 62%

Since a Whitelist was used for the first one , why didn't it come in to play for the second one?

When I queried where the Whitelist came from I was told by support it was not from GoDaddy but when I did a reverse look up on the IP address, it was indeed owned by GoDaddy.

Support also told me that the spam filters do not tag messages based on the email address on the message. The contents of the message (keywords, links, etc). are what decide Spam outcomes.

I am sure you would all agree that is totally wrong, unless I wasted all my effort to build up entries in the ALLOWED list and BLOCKED list.

And speaking of the ALLOWED and BLOCKED lists - an even bigger complaint is that when you look at the contents of the lists it displays in some random order - I guess they have never heard of an alphabetical list to make life simpler for users.

When you add an entry to the list, they do not even validate if it is already there, and even more disturbing is that you can add the same email address to both the ALLOWED and BLOCKED lists. That's some bit of coding they have.

I worked for a software company for 17 years and I know the pressures that support and development folk are under and so I always try to provide as much information as possible when I contact a support department and it is annoying when the reply back answers a question that was not asked and the ones that were asked are ignored

Biggest Pro: When The Contract Ends
Biggest Con: Whoever Designed Their Spam Logic Failed Badly

Email is badly broken, unusable for a business

The basic webhosting is OK. MIght not have the latest version of PHP or anything like that, but for the most part the hosting is reasonably fast and gets the job done.

The big problem is email. Email on GoDaddy is screwed, and close to unusable for a business.

For starters, although they claim to give you six gigazillion bytes of storage, that's not for email. Email is only 10 MB, unless you pay (just more) additional money, so even a couple of large attachments will result in the inbox overflowing & the emails being rejected.

But a far larger problem is their incoming email filter. GoDaddy has 2 layers of email "spam" filtering. The first layer is hidden from you; the second is controllable via some spam filter settings in your webmail controls. The first layer, the one you have no control over, has a nasty habit of rejecting perfectly good emails from valid domains. I've had this occur on multiple occasions, with emails sent to me from several different customers. I've passed these on to godaddy & told them to remove this "email pre-filter" on my account, but they've said "no".

For a business, this is a disaster. Emails from customers or potential customers are sporadically rejected, and you'll never never know. It'll cost you business. It's costing me business. And GoDaddy couldn't care less.

Biggest Con: Email is broken