Help for authors timid about technology
There was a time when I had almost 40 domains with GoDaddy. I started using them ten years ago, back when GoDaddy was a new website with dungeon low prices.
Now I don’t own a single domain with GoDaddy.
Here are seven reasons why you should move away from GoDaddy:
#1 GoDaddy Has Terrible Support
I had one client who had constant trouble with her email because GoDaddy support constantly gave her wrong advice. She would have a small problem with her email and would call GoDaddy. By the end of the call her email would be totally broken.
Finally, she hired me to conference in with the GoDaddy representative and interrupt each time the GoDaddy rep would give her bad information. I had to interrupt a lot.
Update: GoDaddy has made some improvements in the last few years in the support arena. They offer better support than they used to. I don’t think this reason alone is reason to move away from them. But it is not the only reason to avoid GoDaddy.
#2 GoDaddy is Overpriced
GoDaddy lures customers in with prices that look low.
GoDaddy makes it look like .com domains cost $1.99 per year when in reality domains cost $10 for the first year and $15 for every year after that.
Price Comparison:
- GoDaddy ($24.94/year)
- $14.99/year for Domain Renewal
- $2.95/year for Email Forwarding
- $7.00/year for WhoIs Protection
- Namecheap.com ($13.57/year)
- $10.69/year Domain Renewal
- $0.00/year Email Forwarding
- $2.88/year for WhoIs Protection
They also charge you extra (or don’t) for things Namecheap throws in for free, like landing page customization. Now these prices are constantly in flux and go on sale from time to time. The key is to focus on the renewal price. Sale prices typically only apply to the first year.
#3 GoDaddy is Hard to Use
I cringe any time I hear a novice say they bought a domain on GoDaddy.
GoDaddy spends so much time trying to up-sell customers that it is hard to buy what you came to buy. If you don’t know what you are doing, you may find yourself paying for all sorts of things you don’t need. These added services can make your domain harder to use.
You have to be fairly savvy to use GoDaddy and not get ripped off.
Tweetables
- 6+ reasons why authors should avoid GoDaddy. – Click to tweet.
- Thinking about GoDaddy? Read this first. – Click to tweet.
- I cringe any time I hear someone say they used GoDaddy. – Click to tweet.
- Is GoDaddy giving bad advice? – Click to tweet.
- Ever wonder why we don’t recommend GoDaddy? Here’s why. – Click to tweet.
#4 GoDaddy Hosting is Slow
iThemes, a major WordPress theme development company, blasted GoDaddy for overselling hosting space. GoDaddy puts thousands of websites on a single server. All those websites compete for server processing time and bandwidth. This causes the sites to run slow, especially if any of them are popular. The GoDaddy speed issues are exacerbated by the fact that Google now penalizes slow sites on its search results.
Not only is the hosting slow but making server changes is slow as well.
If you change the wrong thing you may not know anything is broken for thirty minutes and it may take another thirty minutes to “unchange” whatever it is you broke.
#5 GoDaddy Gives Too Little Control
Not only is GoDaddy slow but their server back end is difficult to use and limited. Instead of giving users an industry standard admin interface (like cPanel or Plesk), they give users a proprietary admin interface that is more interested in selling you more GoDaddy products than in giving you the tools you need.
This makes it harder (i.e. more expensive) to do simple things on GoDaddy.
#6 GoDaddy Uses Smut to Sell
Some people are more concerned about the moral degradation of our country than others. Many people feel the country is moving in the wrong direction. Let me just say that GoDaddy is no force for good in our culture. GoDaddy notoriously has the most offensive Super Bowl ads every year. Each year they submit ads that are deemed too inappropriate even for TV.
They then feature these “too hot for TV” ads on their homepage.
Even the ads that do get approved objectify woman’s bodies and degrade women into objects of lust for the purpose of making money. This is inappropriate, uncalled for, and not something conscientious people should support with their money. If we allow companies to manipulate our sexual desires to make a profit, how can we say we are any better than animals?
Authors can do better than GoDaddy.
#7 GoDaddy Backed SOPA & PIPA
GoDaddy backed one of the most destructive laws ever to threaten the internet. It was only after 50,000 GoDaddy users left in protest that they changed course.
While I applaud GoDaddy for finally coming out against SOPA, the fact is that we can’t trust them to protect the internet. it also shows us that if enough people transfer away from GoDaddy due to the offensive ads, that they might change course on that as well.
The Good News
You are not stuck with GoDaddy.
We help authors move away from GoDaddy all the time. Namecheap even offers a discount to GoDaddy users who transfer their domains away. Just use the coupon code Switch2NC and you will get a year added to your domain for a discount.
There are also a lot of better hosting providers. We recommend that you host with us :-)
But to host on our server, we need to build your author website.
If that is not an option we also recommend:
- ZippyKid (Best speed)
- Host Gator (Best value)
We recommend you register your domain with a 3rd party company and not your web host. Your website is safer when you don’t have all your eggs in one basket and the companies who are the best at domains (like Namecheap) are often not the same companies who are best at hosting (ZippyKid and Host Gator).
I just started a site yesterday and I knew it was to be slow. It is. Veeeery slow. I already found that there are near 2900 sites hosted in the same server. Crazy.
I don't care right now because it is going to take a few months until the site gets some traffic but I'll run away soon. I wanted to go with Media Temple but they don't accept PayPal for monthly payments, you have to pay a full year in advance and that's something I'm not going to do until I have some first hand experience. Extrange. So I decided to use the hosting plan I had with GoDaddy and that had little use. No worth the money for a real site.
And yes, as a GoDaddy customer for the past couple of years, I have to agree with all your points. Well, except for #6, I just don't know what was that about.
Regards.
I agreed with the post, and am always appalled at GoDaddy's frat-boy approach to advertising.
If a company needs sex to make their product sell, it's probably because it's a bad product.
Godaddy domains…..best service at affordable cost
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I have moved most of my sites from godaddy, but still have a couple left. Two of them are on servers with 4500 other sites!!! That is a joke and an insult. Both run wordpress, so both are dog slow. Needless to say I will be cuttting all ties with godaddy very soon.
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I know. Now, I need to find someone to help me move my sites to a new hosting account. I actually haven't encountered any problems..yet. I've heard horror stories though.
Godaddy slow as hell
I like the hot ads tho, sexy woman make my day!
if you think godaddy is slow why not sign op with one of their parternship companies
you can easily be a reseller of godaddy prodct yourself. Half the hosting sites listed as godaddys competition are their affiliated reseller lmao. Personally i have experienced an array of various hosting services, and pretty much you get what you pay for regardless of provider. AND godaddy is cheapest by far with best product in my opinion. Some hosting providers do offer short lived sales on dedicated servers though but they do not beat prices at gd in the long run.
AFter all i have to conclude that all hosting providers suck, because in the big picture they are all slow as hell including the dedicated servers that are overpriced or impractical at thousands of dollars for quality server that could handle 10+k requests. So, the best option is to get fiberoptic business line and run own server with preferred distro/config and full control
I’m not ready to make a change at the moment. I pay the big bucks to GoDaddy for dedicated server & have spent more aggrivating hours with the at least 50% of support that are quite clueless & yes… of course..want to up-sell me at every turn.
I’m totally intrigued with your fiberotpic business line. At a later point I would like to explore this option… so I would like your contact info.
Thank you for giving options! I have felt like a hostage with GoDaddy!
Bonnie
If you ever let your domain lapse, GD will helpfully auction it off…guess who gets to keep the proceeds!
I wish I read this before I decided GoDaddy was cheaper than Bluehost, which is one that I have used before. I just assumed that they used Cpanel, which GoDaddy does not. I paid yesterday, and I am trying to cancel my service today. Then, I will go this Host Gator.
I would never buy hosting from them, although I've heard that they are making an effort to do better in customer service these days. I think there are plenty of better options though. I personally use Dreamhost and I have been very happy with them. Prices are reasonable for hosting and multiple domain name registration, and I have gotten very quick responses on technical questions.
The only thing I might venture to get from godaddy is a SSL certificate because I think they have pretty good authority and you can snag one for pretty cheap especially if you use a promo code from one of the coupon sites out there. Renewal is considerably more expensive though :-/
There are so many better options than GoDaddy. At this point they are simply riding on brand recognition. I only have a few more sites to transfer away from them..
My recent post Record Breaking Electricity Usage in Texas
Who did you go with when you switched from GD? Thanks
I use namecheap for domains. Hostgator Virtual server for hosting. Never had a problem in 10 years.
namecheap is an enom registrar.
I visited your website and it looks very good!
How hard is it to switch hosting etc from GoDaddy to someone else? I can’t afford to pay someone two switch me over but I’m not sure if I can do it myself and I don’t want to mess my site up. I also really hate how they send me emails several times per week to let me know my hosting expires this month. Um, no it doesn’t. It auto renews every single month, that is what I PAY for. There is no way to stop getting those emails. Frustrating. I’ve been with them for years and it’s all I know.
Blessings,
Mel
Please feel free to stop by: Trailing After God
I’m afraid I fell into the same trap. I can afford to switch though I shouldn’t have to but I think I’m locked in for 2 months before the name can be transferred to another host…is that correct?
Mark, that is correct. Generally you have to wait 60 days before you can transfer the domain.
Thanks for the post. I didn’t know! Enjoyed your workshop yesterday in Fredericksburg. We did not touch on this topic then. Blessings!
Ello jumping in to say whats up, michale also says whats up and maybe we can get together next week
I appreciated your comment reason #6. For me, that is a very important issue.
Godaddy is the best i have around 20,000 domain with go daddy and 20,000 are hosted by go daddy my people have no problem with go daddy i do a ping ever day and all are around 20ms
ever one loves my work and go daddy works with me as i asked them their told me their look after me so i have 20,000 people paying me and go daddy only makes around 10% so i’m making money like no tomorrow for me
Their dedicated servers are EXCELLENT for the price, have had 2 dedicated servers with them over the last 2 years, I don’t think they have gone down once.
found your site while waiting for my site to UPLoad to godaddy. And I have a 29MPS fiber line upward, so it ain’t me. Unless you are feeling really really cheap and can’t bear to have two bills, one for domain and one for hosting, find someone else.
gah, still uploading.
I have to say I disagree with your article. Althoguh some of these are at depths deeper than my knowledge, I can tell you that I have had GREAT success with GoDaddy. Of the times that I’ve had to contact support, I’ve only had one issue where the support was wrong, and that was actually because of an issue with Microsoft that had gotten their info wrong first (exchange merging). Their customer service I find to be top notch. I get someone in the U.S. They always review my account when I call. Not to sell me more, but to make sure I’m where I need to be. More often than not I’m saving money. Every company has issues, but I’m not sure your info above is at all correct.
I don’t have a problem with their prices or using pretty girls to sell their products. And I don’t find their services hard to use, although it would be nice to have a bit more control.
However, I had a huge problem with their hosting being extraordinarily slow and their support was unable to correct the problem or even recognize that there was an issue on their end. I ran into performance problems that were so severe (page load times of 21 to 300+ seconds) that my site was unusable. And this was on their 4GH Ultimate Windows ASP.NET 4.0 platform that supposedly was going to be “lightning fast”.
I fought with them for three weeks to get them to realize there were performance problems and to get the problems corrected but without any success. At one point the support person tried to argue with me about the number of times I had called that day for support (she said it was 7 I told her it was just 3) inferring that I needed to finally understand that this was MY problem and to stop wasting their time.
Based on a friend’s recommendation I copied my ASP.NET code – without ANY changes – to a free Microsoft Windows Azure site and the performance was amazing on Azure. Keep in mind that there were NO CHANGES to this ASP.NET code and so it continued to use the SQL Server database that was hosted on GoDaddy.com’s servers.
I changed the DNS A record to point to the new Azure site and will soon begin the process of moving EVERYTHING I have on GoDaddy.com to a company that is competent at hosting sites and of providing technical support.
And so although I think the hosting prices are pretty cheap, the cost was actually really high since my company got a couple black eyes because of poor performance at a critical time.
I’ve had a great experience with GoDaddy for about 10 years. I’d never leave them. They are the reason I have money in my checking and savings account, pay my bills, and generally make people think I’m awesome because I run all kinds of websites and they don’t know how I make so much magic on the internet. GoDaddy hosts it all.
“I had one client who had constant trouble with her email…”
I would be a little more thorough in your research before saying GoDaddy support is terrible. You had 1 gal who couldn’t figure out her email? If you had some larger evidence I would tally this up to just bad writing, as its not very convincing or informative.
“I cringe any time I hear a novice say they bought a domain on GoDaddy”
Again, really? Insult your readers? You cringe because someone signed up with the largest hosting company in the world? GoDaddy’s all-in-one service is for novices and its pretty easy to use.
The rest of the items on your blog are kind of rubbish as well. Especially #6. You must avoid A LOT of products and services if using appealing advertising is a problem for you.
I have had a great experience with GoDaddy with 2 company domains, emails and a quick and simple website I needed for a short time to get started a long time ago.
The reason I decided to comment is because I don’t think GoDaddy is a problem for people. What is a problem is that anytime someone wants to research a company, service, or product on the web, all we get is thousands of blogs returned by Google that give low-effort unsubstantiated opinions by bloggers.
To sum things up: Anyone who reads this: GoDaddy is perfectly fine and their support is awesome! Yes its a little more expensive on some things, but not much. However, I would invite someone to try and switch over to Microsoft Exchange through Microsoft and then through GoDaddy. Godaddy does everything for you so you don’t have to stress out. You DO get some benefit for a few extra bucks. They always answer the phone, they always follow up and they are NOT pushy on sales. Being savvy in not being up-sold has nothing to do with whether or not one is a tech “novice” or whether it makes them evil. They’re a business. In fact, they never up-sold me. They would tell me I don’t need something when I wanted it and they were right and saved me money.
So, there you go. Here is a positive review that should cancel out your one lady friend’s email troubles.
I switched from Godaddy to Namecheap ion 2004 and it wasn’t for any of these reason. One of my domain names that I have an affiliate program on was flagged for spam. Was not me spamming but an actually affiliate.
GoDaddy ‘suspended’ my domain for spamming and wanted something like $200 to unlock it! I transferred it immediately out and never looked back.
I have one client with a WordPress business website hosted on GoDaddy shared hosting. Domaintools.com reports 7,506 websites on this server (IP 184.168.233.1) – absolutely ridiculous
He and I are now discussing options to move the site to a decent host; the shortlist includes Host Gator and GNAX.
His site for the past month or so has been nearly unusable.
Any WP admin pages time out more often than they load. Even the CACHED front-end pages often time out for public (logged-out) visitors.
Google page speed was never good, but now it’s around 7 seconds on average (my own business Drupal site on GN.. averages 1.2 seconds, with some cached pages in 0,12 seconds, and a static HTML subdomain site averages under 0.12s with some pages in 0.02s – also shared VPS with about 175 other sites. Note: I have 2 WP, 1 Drupal and 1 HTML sites on my domain)
RE – control panel interface – Fully agree it’s clumsy, and aimed more at promoting GD’s own products than ease of use (CPanel rocks!)
The error logging system sucks too – 7 days only – What’s wrong with having a perpetual logging system? And then the logs are hard to access – most of the time clicking the link to the log files redirects to an article “how to use the error logging system”.
(No – I’m not a GN.. or associate Affiliate or re-seller, nor do I get any form of commission for hosting sites there – I just happen to be pleased with the performance)
As my sites grow Godaddy becomes impossible to use anymore. Have used the deluxe account for a couple years. Now anytime someone shares a post, the sites go down for at least 5 to 10 minutes. Anyone happy with godaddy is either not making money with traffic or using virtual servers in my opinion.
Am calling around these past few days to make a change.
Their renewal rate went up again? Last time I checked, it was $13 something after taxes. What the hell? I really need to switch to Namecheap.
I would expect quite a lot from your website service at the prices quoted. [OMG--WTF!] For that money, I could set up my own branded publishing company.
Godaddy hasn’t always been perfect, but it beats the heck out of some cheaper services–like 1and1.com for example or acsite.net. At least godaddy has customer support that speaks American.
As for being slow, yes, I’ve seen that. I wonder how long it will be before hostgator and other places have the same problems?
Everything you say about Go Daddy is true. They are terrible. While some of the comments on this post are nearly 3 years old, everything is still true today. When you have a problem, Go Daddy support tries to convince you the problem is because of something you did or your code when often the problem, especially when it comes to slow page loading, is due to an overloaded server. A few things:
1) You can get WhoIsGuard privacy protection at Namecheap for $0.99 per year when you use a coupon code that has been good for over 2 years now. People can search for it.
2) Namecheap is an excellent registrar and does not bombard you with spam emails or upsells when you make a purchase.
3) Go Daddy’s control panel is difficult to use. cPanel is much easier and many web hosts offer it.
Go Daddy is simply the worst.
Although I can’t agree with you on your every point, but a dissatisfaction came to my mind that Godaddy is not allowing me to renew .com.au domain. There is no auto-renew option even, nor I am able to renew the domain. In this case, Godaddy sucks.
Godaddy has become even slower, and I’m not talking about WordPress sites either, just straight HTML. Some of your other points are accurate, particularly Godaddy’s tasteless ad campaigns & aggravating up-sell tactics built into their system.
But to update the overall situation: WordPress (& other CMS) sites have come under heavy attack of late, and Hostgator bore a major brunt of the the brute force attempts to get into & take control of CMS’.
Notwithstanding, your suggestion to host with you is a joke! Your prices are obscene & it appears you only resell Mediatemple server space. You can malign Godaddy support, but your charging $55 > $25 per support ticket as incentive to pay you $70 per month for hosting (vs. $6 & free support) makes this post a pretty shameless self-promotion in its own right.
i have the same problem with you, before i always buy new domain name from gaddy, and the next time i buy hosting too…becouse i want get fast propagation
BUT what i Get!!!
Very slow hosting!!!!!!
i must installed manually ioncube loader
i must install manually zend optimizer
phpthumb not working
auto installer application like wordpress very slow , you need 24 hour to finish your wordpress installation ( you can isntall manually more faster but its hurts me)
maximum excecution time limited by hosting, so if you import big content not working…
generally web hsoting using, cpanel but godaddy using custom panel,,,very not familiar with us and hard to use.
Create addon domain ..SLOW
create mysql SLOW
PRice Too Much Expensive..than other webhsoting
FOR ALL , I SAID GODADDY VERY SLOWW HOSTING NOT RECOMENDDED FOR YOU, SPECIALLY FOR NEWBEE
I never use GD hosting but I bought a lot of their domains . They offer a good service as I think. For anyone who complained about it (DOMAIN). I don’t know if you ever read the definition of Domain Name System and how it works.
The propagation when you change your DNS will never be a problem unless you don’t know how to configure, it’s clear as daylight . Their resolve the ip so quick and you never ever recognize the difference between GD and the others.
Talking about hosting, I suggest Hostgator, they’re the best with affordable price to me .
Wow, your post is full of misinformation:
#2 Re:prices – email forwarding is free. It’s only a paid service if you use over 100 free forwarding addresses/domain. Renewals for .com are $14.99 yes but have some common sense and find a coupon to save 25% which then send out in nearly every email.
#3 Hard to use? Come on, that’s like saying don’t get windows because it’s hard to use. Sorry everything isn’t 1 big simple button for you to click on. There’s a million things you can do on the website, so you’re going to have to use your brain to navigate.
#4 / #5 You complain that the hosting is slow and you don’t get cpanel but the plans you are talking about cost a mere 10 to 30 CENTS PER DAY. You expect cpanel/plesk and super fast hosting paying 10 CENTS PER DAY? Get real. How much do you pay for your cell phone? $2-3/day, right? What kind of service do you think would would get paying $3/month for cell phone service? Stop complaining and upgrade to a dedicated server to get speed and cpanel/plesk. You get what you pay for, and to expect phenomenal speed for $3/mo is laughable. I mean how naive can you get?
#7 Half true. They supported the original version of sopa, and when it changed the pulled their support. They never supported pipa.