Friends Don’t Let Friends Use GoDaddy (Hosting)

Honestly, we hate to rant, but sometimes there’s a need to let off steam.

Let us paint the picture. An inherited site with a million plugins, out-of-date behemoth theme, a hundred different developers work (ok, we may be exaggerating a little here…) and… GoDaddy hosting.

First of all, we should say that whilst GoDaddy often get bashed (and rightfully so), they recently appeared to be making some good steps, especially in the WordPress space.

  • They acquired ManageWP, which still seems to be solid (albeit a few minor blips recently)
  • They acquired CoBlocks, a pretty solid block plugin.
  • They released an open source theme called Go, which seems nice.

With all that good stuff…

Their Hosting Still Sucks

It boasts some great features, but from our (thankfully limited) experience it’s as bad as it gets. Here’s some highlights:

Constant sFTP disconnections

SFTP disconnects almost every minute. Not fun.

Staging sites are extremely throttled

Try getting work done when the staging site is slower than a snail.

Push to live breaks

Want to push staging to live? great! Be prepared to wait hours. This took around 4 hours and three support chats.

Support Sucks

This is the real kicker. A lot can be forgiven if the support is quick and responsive. GoDaddy support is the opposite of this. We tried two methods; live chat and telephone, both equally as bad.

Live chat spoke in mostly broken English – a few spelling errors here and there is fine but this was very bad. They made promises that they didn’t stick to e.g. “I’ve fixed this and it will be working within 30 minutes” – if you ever hear this on GoDaddy support you can translate this to “I don’t know how to solve your issue, I want you to get off of chat so I don’t have to deal with it”.

Live chat got us nowhere, but wait! there’s a telephone number. Surely that can’t be bad? You guessed it. It can. If not worse. The person on the telephone didn’t know what a staging site is (seriously), we were then put on hold and eventually hung up after 10 minutes of terrible music.

Simply, the worst we’ve ever experienced (and we’ve experienced a lot of hosts!).

GoDaddy, if you are reading this. Please, sort your hosting and support out. You can acquire many great products, but your reputation is always going to be poor if your hosting and support are so sub-par.

Who else has experienced such woes? let us know in the comments.

Update: GoDaddy also appears to have a terrible refund policy. If you’ve paid for a year hosting, you can only cancel in the first 30 days. No pro-rata refunds after this. Avoid like the plague!