You know that phrase “I [hate|despise] you with the fire of a thousand suns”? Well, that doesn’t begin to describe the way I feel about GoDaddy, the world’s worst — IMHO — hosting provider and general all-around provider of web services.
How did they earn my undying enmity? There are too many examples to go into but suffice it to say they could give the Ferengi from Star Trek: Next Generation a run for their money. Because they do everything they can to keep you from migrating away from them.
Plus, their tech support is to die for. Literally — you risk your life every time you contact them, because they can just about drive anyone to seek solace and closure through suicide.
My latest adventure with them began when I tried to migrate several websites I host to a different registrar (all web domains must be registered, and you pay recurring fees for the registration). That’s supposed to be simple…but not when GoDaddy gets involved. If you’ve “protected” your domain against inadvertent or malicious transfers they’ll prompt you to remove the protection before initiating the transfer — because the transfer can’t take place otherwise — but when they tell you they’ve removed the protection they actually haven’t. Sort of like being on double super-secret probation in Animal House.
It took two tech support sessions, each lasting over an hour, to fix that glitch…sort of. Along the way the second tech support guy had me authorize the transfers a different way — meaning one which the web page used to request the transfer never bothered to disclose you had to do — after which they transferred within a few minutes.
But that only worked for three of the six domains I was trying to transfer. The other three remained in limbo, aka GoDaddy Hell. And I ended the support call before I realized not all the domains had transferred.
Three separate tech support sessions later I still don’t have those three domains transferred. And guess what? I had to sign up for — and be overcharged for — another year of GoDaddy registration in the meantime because the current registrations were about to expire. Am I being paranoid to think that was the point of screwing up the transfers in the first place? Probably paranoia…but with these clowns and their business practices I’m not sure.
My “favorite” tech support session was the last (latest?) one, which was by phone because the other problem with GoDaddy’s online tech support is their online support staff don’t have English as their native language so it’s difficult to communicate with them by text.
So this clown — who claimed to be “second level” — kept walking me through the transfer process that had already failed multiple times. And ignoring my reminders that one of his colleagues had figured out how to solve the problem for three of the sites so could he maybe just talk to someone more experienced to learn what that was???
He had me repeat the transfer process so many times — despite my reminding him that things were unfolding exactly the way the earlier failed attempts had proceeded — that I finally blew up and said “You know what the definition of insanity is, don’t you? Trying the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. Congratulations, you’ve just proved you’re insane!”
Bottom-line, never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, do business with GoDaddy. You have been warned.
Unless you’re into self-flagellation, in which case, please, seek psychological counseling.