Journal dgatwood's Journal: Chronicles of GoDaddy: How not to run an ISP 16
This is a review of the GoDaddy.com ISP. For a brief period of time, I used them for both my SSL certificate provider and my hosting provider. That lasted about a week. This review chronicles my experience with GoDaddy so that others can avoid the same fate.
It's hard to know where to begin when criticizing my experience with GoDaddy. It all started with a GoDaddy SSL certificate that was expiring in mid-August. Things started going wrong when GoDaddy sent me the expiration notice in mid-June. I immediately went to their website to renew. When I got there, I got a message that said I couldn't renew it for three days. I wrote them to complain and their reply basically said, "Yes, you can't renew before a certain date." Three days later, on the day it said I should be able to renew it, it still said I couldn't renew it.
A couple of weeks later, I went back to renew. I submitted a renewal for 9 years and paid for it (almost $270). I thought it was odd that they still hadn't sent out the cert, but I figured it would happen on the billing date for the account.
In the meantime, I decided to try to speed up my website by moving large graphics to shared hosting. Since I had a GoDaddy account already, I added hosting to it. Thankfully, I only paid for two months. While uploading content to the server, I started having weird problems almost immediately, finding that the server would just suddenly block my IP (including pings) for several minutes at a time. I theorized that they were limiting the number of reconnects per minute, so I spread the load out across several IPs and finished my uploading. I did all this over the holiday weekend to minimize impact.
Well, once I had the content on the server, I switched my home server to point to the images on that server. The next night, I tried to view a page full of thumbnail images and it stalled for a very long time. The problem went away after a couple of minutes, so I ignored it. When it happened again the next night, I started becoming concerned. When it happened on the fourth night, I started running a script that requested a tiny 15K image once a minute so that I could characterize the problem.
I contacted GoDaddy at this point, and they blamed my connection. I then reproduced the problem from work (where they have multiple OC-3 connections). I contacted them again. They continued to just say "We can't reproduce this" and actually had the nerve to suggest that I call them when I have the problem. How do you call somebody about a problem that only lasts 2-3 minutes from the start of the hang to the end? That's like telling somebody, "When you see a shooting star, text me so I can look up." Yikes!
Then, it got better. GoDaddy contacted me and said that they couldn't issue my SSL certificate because they now issue them for a maximum of 5 years---this in spite of the fact that their website was perfectly willing to sell me a 9-year certificate. So they started the process of issuing a refund.
A few hours later, they denied the refund. At this point, I wrote them back, chewed them out massively, listing in detail the litany of problems I had experienced with their service, carbon copied the president of GoDaddy, and basically threatened legal action if they didn't fix this mess. They restarted processing of the refund, but continued to refuse to honor the terms of our contract.
Their servers are still performing inadequately, so I plan to drop their service entirely as soon as I figure out where to migrate the files. And my SSL cert no longer comes from GoDaddy. I didn't even wait for my existing cert to expire; I don't want GoDaddy to get the free advertising. It also helps that my new SSL cert provider is free as in beer. I figure it's worth the hassle of renewing the cert annually to save $30 a year.
The bottom line is that I was going to spend about $114/year in hosting and SSL with GoDaddy, but because of their completely inept customer support, I'm now going to spend exactly $0 with them, and I will be spending a fair amount of time over the next few weeks posting detailed, harsh, negative reviews of their hosting service on every site I can find, from FaceBook to Web Hosting Geeks....
If I did my job as well as their customer service reps did their jobs, I would have lost my job after the first day. How, precisely, do these clowns stay in business? And how have they not had their credit card merchant account revoked?
David
P.S. Does anyone know of a web hosting provider that allows SSH, is reasonably reliable, and doesn't claim the rights to produce derivative works based on anything you upload?
Re: (Score:2)
I'd second this, I've been using nearlyfreespeech.net for a couple of years now, with several sites, and have literally never had a single problem.
If you can do what you need in PHP and mysql, and understand what you are doing technically, they're great.
The best ISP customer support I've ever had was from Chad at shire.net (who runs it). They're not quite as cheap as nearlyfreespeech, but if you need something done quickly, competently, etc.. check with them. I got into shire.net because they were the only
Re: (Score:2)
I need to store 15 gigabytes of content. At that hosting site, this would cost $150---more than a dedicated server at a colocation facility.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the tip on dreamhost. I decided to give them a shot. Preliminary tests indicate that it is roughly four times as fast as my GoDaddy hosting was, and that's when the GoDaddy hosting wasn't stalling for minutes at a time.... :-)
On the flip side, either the dreamhost web server or my DSL connection was down almost continuously from about 3:30 A.M. until 8:30 A.M. on both Monday and Tuesday morning. I think I should move my server reliability test back to my work machine where I don't have to wond
openhosting.com (Score:1)
There's also openhosting.com, who are sort of expensive, but do give you pretty good service. They essentially give you your own box on a "shared hosting" model. bluehost.com is pretty decent, but have a somewhat limited understanding of what "DNS" means. As long as you only want A or MX records, you can have whatever you want, but go outside the envelope, and you'll have to get your own DNS provider.
Re: (Score:2)
15 GB of storage @ $1.31 per gig ; $20.
1 GB of RAM (the minimum) @ $22.64 per gig; $22.64
10 GB of disk space (the minimum---actual is closer to 300 MB) @ $0.75 per gig; $0.75.
Total is about $43/month. That's a little steep... as in almost ten times what I'm paying per month from GoDaddy, and $8 more than it would cost to colo an entire Mac Mini. I just can't afford to blow that much on hosting.
Re: (Score:1)
Read what they're offering - You're saying 10GB of network transfer, but you're saying actual is 300M. That's actually 0.03 * 0.75 = $0.0225
Read the example above the ratecalc if you don't believe me - They actually charge you per token (KB-minute) for disk and RAM.
Unless you're using the KVM option, you're usually doing OK. For example:
You say 1GB of RAM, but you're very unlikely to have that sort of commit set; they're not charging you for I/O cache, unless you're using the KVM virtualised stuff instead
Re: (Score:2)
No, that's not 15 GB that I might use in the future. That's 15 gigs actively in use. :-) I'm using it for my personal photo collections because I can't serve large images quickly enough off my DSL connection.
Re: (Score:1)
AFAICT, then, you want someone cheap and cheerful. Try bluehost.com - They offer a plan with 'unlimited' disk space (on shared hosting) for $7/month. Of course, they bank on the majority of their customers not using anything like what they could. PGSql, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, Python are included in the deal, but they have processes to limit CPU time.
You can host your email through them, or use them as a backup MX.
They seem to me to have rather limited downtime - a guy I work with has only had a period of 3 ho
My recommendation (Score:2)
I've got a few sites on my friend's server, orangetreehosting.com. Ssh available, you've just got to request it. I've been with maybe a half-dozen hosts since 1997, several owned by friends, and this one is the best I've had. He just (this month) got a fast new box.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd use them, but I'd end up spending $225 per month (three of the "Pro" accounts) to get the disk space needed. The content I'm serving is my personal photo gallery, and I'm currently at about 15 GB. If they'd let me mail them an external drive, I might consider it, but....
You have my sympathy (Score:2)
Webfaction (Score:1)
Free SSL? (Score:2)
It also helps that my new SSL cert provider is free as in beer.
I'd be interested where you get the free SSL cert you mentioned?
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.startssl.com/ [startssl.com]. The only slight flaw is that they don't work with Internet Explorer yet. They've jumped through the hoops, and Microsoft is expected to add their root cert later this year. Currently, though, unless you manually add the root cert, it only works in FireFox and Safari... which is all I care about anyway. :-)
Bluehost (Score:1)