“It’s just not right that so many things don’t work when they should. I don’t think that will change for a long time.” – Steve Wozniak
After a ten-year plus relationship with GoDaddy, I’ve closed my account. It felt good as GoDaddy of today isn’t what GoDaddy was ten years ago. I argue the service has been getting worse as time as gone on, just like Network Solutions. These companies might be forgetting what got them there in the first place. Here are my reasons and my next steps.
Why GoDaddy Worked
- Lost cost. Very competitive pricing.
- Good technical support. I did have a couple of problems and their support was great. Even restored my DotNetNuke website back to a functional level. Gave them mad kudos’ for that.
- Great DNS Management. I argue the simplest in the business.
Why I Said No to GoDaddy
- My hosted WordPress site was painfully slow using the Economy hosting. Every time I publish, the website would go offline and timeout for 3-5 minutes. Every time. Call up GoDaddy and support would say I am on shared services. If I need more speed, need to upgrade. The speed issue exacerbated module and version upgrades. The last straw was a failed JetPack upgrade due to timeouts. No more.
- GoDaddy’s management site is slow. I’d log into my portal and it clocks transitioning between screens. Constant pop ups with new products and ads, but getting to the guts has slowed way down from ten years ago. Super annoying to embed in the management interfaces. Not good.
- No support for free SSL. I’ve been talking to them about this for a long time. There are many competitive offers out there offering a free SSL cert for a single WordPress site. If you’re a singular blogger or small business, why not a free SSL cert? No support for Let’s Encrypt. In fact, they’ve designed their system to prevent it without hacking their system. Not supporting these technologies may seem like protecting their turf. I argue it’s an example of legacy companies not getting with modern times. Fail.
- On and on sales phone calls. GoDaddy would call me and try to up sell me on products, many I didn’t need. When I talked about my slow website and lack of support for Let’s Encrypt, the sales guy started dodging. I’d hang up and get another call a week later, resuming the up sell. Finally, had to tell them to stop calling me. Sales pressure tactics when you’re not trying to fix your product or ease my pain means you don’t care about me. Bottom line.
And I had to call to cancel. Digital transformation not apparently in effect at Godaddy. I was genuinely worried I would be pressured just like a gym membership. Alas, “Joel” took my call and walked me through. I asked for a refund for my remaining months and got it. A+ Joel. I might come back.
Where Did I Go?
I transitioned to Dreamhost. Performance has been far better, although they need to work on their management tools. User interface needs much work. But, it’s very nice to functional without wait times for the same money.
One More Thing…
Colleagues have pointed me to NameSilo as an inexpensive domain name registrar. I’ve been using them for a few domains and really like their interface and pricing.
\\ JMM