Once upon a time GoDaddy was a reasonable company. Now they bully and intimidate my customers with a nickel-and-dime approach to everything. Three recent examples:
- A customer was called by a so-called GoDaddy representative about having a then-insecure hosting account (http, not https), and was told that GoDaddy (not Google!) would restrict access to their web page. Fortunately, when I looked into it, his account allowed for a Free SSL certificate to be installed. Most of the rest of my clients who have GoDaddy are paying $75/year. Not sure why his was free, and I don’t want to ask or they’ll likely try to charge the $75.
- GoDaddy’s environment is not friendly to the free public domain LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. Yes, while technically they will allow it to be installed, the process is so onerous and vexing that someone with a good working knowledge of Cpanel, ftp and what should be enough Terminal experience can’t figure it out. So frustrating when I know that Cpanel offers it as an option which can be turned on or off for all shared hosting accounts. (As an aside, to be fair, here, my current reseller, TotalChoice Hosting, is also dragging it’s heels by not offering free SSL to its reseller sub-accounts. I ask, what’s the point of having a reseller account, then…? Ugh.)
- GoDaddy claims to offer Managed WordPress sites, supposedly secure and safe from hacking. WRONG. One of my clients got hacked. Then when it was discovered, the customer service rep was only allowed to restore the database from backup, not go in and fix the problem. I was offered a fee-for-service — Malware Removal fix for about $320/yr. Here’s what the rep posted about the Managed WordPress site I administer:
“Managed WordPress hosting is a concierge service where all technical aspects of running WordPress is managed by us. This includes automated security, speed boosting, content caching, WordPress updates, daily backups, website uptime, and scalability. Simply put; we take care of all the tech stuff on the backend, and let you worry about building the site.”
Then, please tell me, why the heck did the site get hacked??? Meanwhile, I was able to FTP in and remove the offending hacked files and restore the site to full working order in under an hour.
Moral to the story: “LEAVE-Daddy”