Today, I am going to restart posting on this blog because I feel more personal experience online can never hurt…that and I need to rant.
In Ostmosis’ most recent project, the client was using an IIS6 Windows server from Godaddy and on the economy account. From all over the world, I have heard how bad Godaddy is in general but had never actually dealt with them before the start of this project. I’m now much wiser. You can view the finished site (and my most recent nightmare) here: Health Mastery Systems.
Everything that could have gone wrong with this site did. I can’t (completely)fault Godaddy with that, but trying to get those problems resolved through their “support” was nothing short of a miracle and my client lost thousands of dollars in the process. They sent me home every day for two weeks with problem after problem after problem with the site (none of which turned out to be accurate). Each of those “problems” came coupled with wrong fix after wrong fix after wrong fix.
A short conversation I had with one of their front-line people:
Me: “The url is pureplantessentials.com. P-U-R-E-P-L-A-N-T essentials.com”
Godaddy Support: “How do you spell essentials in your url?”
Me: “just like essentials is normally spelled.”
Godaddy Support: “No, I mean I don’t know how to spell the word essentials.”
Me: Click.
This wasn’t overseas support – these are Americans I’m talking to(now that I say Americans out loud, it almost makes sense). Each time I ended up on the phone, which was probably about twice a day while I was trying to get this figured out, I was on hold for 5-20 minutes and never got a correct answer from any of them.
To add insult to injury, my client’s hosting is about twice as expensive, the cPanel is more difficult to navigate and the service is less reliable than anything else I have used. Needless to say, I will no longer work with anyone who hosts with Godaddy! Thanks for reading my rant – more to come.
If you want quality and reliable hosting for cheap and with good support, check out Bluehost.
– Christian Ostmo
