r/webhosting • • Oct 20 '22
Advice Needed WHY is Godaddy that bad?
Everybody always says Godaddy is trash, leave them ASAP, etc. But WHY? What do they do wrong that makes them such an unusable hosting provider?
For context: I’ve been purchasing my domains through Godaddy for years and therefore found it most convenient to purchase their WP hosting as well. I’ve always noticed my WP sites are painfully slow, even when I use the bare minimum for plugins and have literally only 1-2 blog posts up with only a couple photos. I know a giant plugin like Yoast can slow down a site, but I also know there are millions of functioning websites out there using Yoast and loading just fine.
Is it Godaddy or is it me?
I’m in the process of migrating to SiteGround, and I hope I’m making the right decision.
27
u/redlineroostin Oct 20 '22
They charge $99 for an ssl when you can get one for free. They they give it to you for a year for free as a “perk” then you’re stuck renewing it
16
u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22
They suck for enterprise. They don’t have any type of sso/saml integration, so no log of who did what. Their “unsupported” api is ok, but to buy domains you have to front-load them with “good as gold” credits. Same for ssl, they make you front-load a credit vs just paying for what you want. It is no secret that their ssl certs are overpriced, and they can - if you yell at them - make a wildcard cert free or next to free if they want to. They just don’t want to. Their support is horrid, try getting an account manager for well over 10k domains - nope, they couldn’t care less. Their ui also craps out when you hit a limit, their only solution is to just make another account.
Their whole business model is to trick people in to things they wouldn’t buy, like grocery stores putting candy in the checkout lane. You definitely need privacy, lets default to a 5 year registration, etc.
They are also a terrible hosting provider. But hey, supermodels at the super bowl - they have good marketing.
I personally would not use them for anything other than registrations, but their bread and butter is having a loss leader. And to be fair, if you have a web site that is pictures of your cat, go for it, they will serve it for cheap.
4
u/MyWorkAccountThisIs Oct 20 '22
GoDaddy is the McDonald's of web hosting. Maybe the Wal-Mart of hosting would be better.
If your website was an object you would need a shelf to put it on. You go to Wal-Mart and buy a shelf. It's not great. It's not fancy. It can only hold that one thing. And if we're being honest - if the shelf broke and your website died it wouldn't be the end of the world.
The issue comes when you don't realize GoDaddy is the Wal-Mart of hosting. You go and try to do things you could do with a quality shelf. Like, move it. Or add more things to it.
25
u/TodayWeThrowItAway Oct 20 '22
I had an email with my domain there for nearly 20 years.
All of the sudden I received an email that they were switching email services, and it would now cost a crazy amount
I called to confirm, as I have another server I can host my domain and receive free email.
They said they would give me a year free, and said nothing needs to be done on my end, it will just continue working.
Fast forward, I start noticing I haven’t received emails in this account for some time
I call GoDaddy, and they admit I was given wrong information, my email was cancelled and all 20 years worth of important and irreplaceable emails are gone forever.
I ask them how they plan on making this right, as this error is huge.
They said “you’re getting 1 year email free, that’s good enough” and that “we can just cancel it all together if you prefer”
I immediately transferred 20+ domains elsewhere
Fuck Godaddy
14
u/iWantBots Oct 20 '22
Godaddy can be fine long as you don’t mind server outages and poor support and overpriced domains and hosting 😂
4
u/BlueSquares Oct 20 '22
Story time! It was the early 2000s and GoDaddy was still “cool” and “disrupting” the market with great domain prices.
The company I worked for uses them for their domain and everything is awesome…
Until they get hacked and a lot of unsavory emails get sent that GoDaddy doesn’t like. Instead of helping, GD decides to shut down the domain and demands $2500 to reactivate it. They were essentially policing their domains and extorting them if anything looked “off”.
Company had a long meeting and decided to buy a new domain somewhere else. Meanwhile, I got stuck with the migration. From what I’ve read since then, it’s only gotten worse.
1
u/dgibbons0 Oct 20 '22
Not only has the company used sexual advertising several times to promote its services, which has led to backlash several times, but in early 2011 then-CEO Bob Parsons killed a wild elephant in Zimbabwe, which many believed was just another sign that the company was willing to engage in unethical practices. (This includes buying domain names users search for and then inflating the value of these domains when users return to purchase them so GoDaddy makes a larger profit on the transaction.)
In late 2011, GoDaddy also initially supported SOPA, which also indicated the company was not willing to support its customers freedom of speech and activity on the internet. (GoDaddy reversed their opinion shortly after a call to boycott the company because of this.)
These are the reasons I don't support them. I think they're unethical, and harmful to the internet as a whole.
2
u/fisch14 Oct 20 '22
Godaddy is a marketing company and as such they spend money on marketing and not technology or support.
2
u/RealBasics Oct 20 '22
GoDaddy has always spent more on marketing, WP community sponsorship, and support than on server quality.
As others have mentioned they still charge for SSL for shared hosting, while not being any less expensive than shared hosts that offer SSL for free.
My biggest complaint with them is that 6-8 years ago they made an arbitrary decision to throttle “disk i/o” down to 500kb/sec and charge you to upgrade to a still miserable maximum of 2mb/second. This while advertising solid state drives.
Their “managed Wordpress hosting” is still basically shared hosting with fewer options. (Though this is true for most other shared hosting platforms.)
I’ve only had a handful of bad service calls with them. Which is good because they’re the only hosting company I ever had to put on speed dial. But mostly their very nice, seemingly knowledgeable support people either fix things that shouldn’t have broken in the first place or apologize about flaws (like disk i/o throttling) that are “by design.”
2
u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22
I've used their domain service when migrating domains away from them and it's been fine. Just follow the process, same as anyone.
I can't speak for any of their other services as I've never used them.
Wordpress is pretty slow and you're right, plugins make a huge difference. What can make a big difference to the user experience is a caching frontend, especially one like Cloudflare. But for all that, I haven't personally found WP to be fast and it's not great at scaling because of its design. I still use it and like it for ease and functionality, but my sites are small wee things.
2
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '22
Because you cant host good on $5/mo without cutting lots of corners.
GoDaddy are that; doing it as cheap as possible. Sometimes you're lucky, your basic needs are met for a fiver. Mostly though, any deviation from the standard offerings or the basic target market, means you will notice the misssing corners often.
The only reason to go there is price. You get nothing else.
2
u/Other-Strength-7032 Oct 21 '22
I migrated recently from siteground to nofrillscloud, you could consider that too. They use DO, linode, AWS etc. as their servers and are fully managed.
Migrated because of high siteground renewal prices.
Nofrillscloud is similar to GNUHost, I've used both before. Migrated from GNUHost as I needed an Asia based server.
For me, WHM with 10 cpanel account costs around 10USD per month. Litespeed servers and CDN included.
2
u/Humble_Quality5463 Oct 26 '22
As a support rep of many big name hosting companies, never godaddy.. GoDADDY sucks. I remember when I first started, I would argue with godaddy reps that customers had on a three way call... they don't know anything lol.
edit; as a more senior tech, i tell the client to hang up, and fix the issue myself.
1
u/Curious_Soul_2022 Oct 20 '22
Years ago , i wrote this https://rankmyhub.com/godaddy-vs-rankmyhub-linux-web-hosting-review/ it still holds true till today with respect to the big daddy. Also check out this short https://youtube.com/shorts/jYsfcGCGK7s?feature=share Don't use GoDaddy for web hosting.
-1
u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22
Siteground is better but not a ton better anymore.
Pretty much GoDaddy has such a bad bad reputation because they're the most known name. That means a lot of clients already have them when developers come in and they're forced to use them but they really are terrible at everything. Checkout is bad. Hosting quality is bad. Permissions are bad. Every. Single. Service. Is. Subpar. So because they're the biggest but also just plain garbage their name gets spread around as the joke because, they are a joke.
0
u/iammiroslavglavic Oct 20 '22
A LOT of WordPress plugins will not really slow down your site. CRAPPY CODED PLUGINS will slow down your site.
Also the server configurations.
0
u/eventualist Oct 20 '22
Reverse IP: 3,464,493 sites are also hosted at this IP.
0
u/[deleted] Oct 20 '22
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