Go Daddy Hosting is Horrible!

Hello everyone,

BEWARE HOSTING YOUR MYSQL DATABASE WITH GODADDY.COM!

I don't ususally post negative postings, but the last week has given me new perspective on one of the newer hosting firms out there and I want to share my experience so others can be informed.

I have been hosting my Web site with GoDaddy.com now for about six months. Until Monday, June 14th, everything was working just fine. I recently began having problems with my MySQL database. The InnoDB tables (17 out of 32 tables) somehow got corrupt and I cannot access them at all. NOTE: all of my critical customer data lies in these tables and I am now having to beg my customers not to cancel their subscriptions with me.

I contacted the GoDaddy tech support team (via email and non-free telephone support) and reported the problem immediately. Every day since Monday I have called and emailed trying to get a status on the fix - since my business is now frozen waiting to get to my customer data. The GoDaddy tech team seem not to care very much that today is now day seven of having no access to my Web site! You would think that my call to a supervisor on Friday and then a letter to the President of their company, Bob Parsons (from Parsons Technology in Mountain View CA), on Saturday would have lit a fire under someones butt, but right now, Sunday the 20th (yes day seven), I still have no access to my database. I actually haven't even received an email since Thursday from anyone at tech support.

This is absolutely unacceptable. They refuse to allow me to talk to their technical staff and I am relegated to working with level 1 phone jockeys to try and get them excited about my problems. At this point it is obvious that GoDaddy is NOT a Web and database hosting company you can trust. Yes, they do email and domain registration very well, but their hosting is the worst I have experienced in my 20+ years in IT. I would consider one of the other low-cost hosting companies before considering GoDaddy for anything you might consider important.

If anyone has had similar experience with their services, or if you have had a good experience, feel free to post a reply, affirmation, or rebuttal.

Jon

Did you have a backup of your database? No?

If you have "critical customer data" on a database with no backups then you are an idiot. Simple as that. Yes, I think they should have done something about it by now but still you should have backups of your database incase things like this happen.

a.koepke, of course I have backups of my important data. That is not the point of the article I posted. I was sharing the trials and tribulations of my last seven (now eight days) with GoDaddy's poor customer support, and what I fear is a weak technical staff. I want others to be aware that they could be in for the same problems.

I had always thought you were a decent guy, but throwing the word "idiot" into your post was uncalled for, and certainly unfriendly. What is it with people when they post to these boards. Is this where everyone comes to get their frustrations out on underserved victims?

You could have easily have said "I hope you had a backup of your important data." and left it at that.

Here is an update from my earlier posting...

As reinforcement to my previous comments, it is now Day 8 of my database being crashed on GoDaddy. Backup or no backup I still cannot USE any databases with my hosting. I discovered this weekend after calling and emailing their customer support that they DO NOT STAFF ANY DEVELOPERS on weekends. Yep, you heard me right, their vaunted 24/7/365 is a flat lie! I was told I would have to wait until Monday and then they would put my problem in the front of the queue and contact me ASAP.

I have sent two letters to Bob Parsons, their President, over the past week to share my problems with his company but have only received a reply from his secretary stating "they will fix the problem as soon as possible."

Well it is Tuesday, June 22nd, I was never contacted (voice or email) Monday as promised by the Supervisor I spoke to, and the databases are still crashed.

This would be hilarious if I wasn't so completely blown away by GoDaddy's complete disregard for customer service. I am convinced now they don't have a single MySQL DBA on their payroll.

Again, if you are considering registering domains or running your email with GoDaddy, great. But beware of considering them for hosting.

The idiot comment is a statement of fact. You said that you have backups of the data so that statement doesn't apply to you. I think that if you run a business without backups you are taking a massive risk and therefore more than worthy of that title.

Now if you have a backup what is stopping you from restoring your database tables from your backup?

In all of this I am not supporting what GoDaddy's are doing or taking their side. As I said in my previous post, I think they should have done something about it by now but still you should have backups of your database incase things like this happen.

If they were unable to fix it within 24 hours I would have restored from backup just to get my site running again.

a.koepke, I have used my backup twice at GoDaddy to create new databases with all of my tables. When the first database crashed I created a new one and it ran for a week before it too locked up and is now unuseable.

I finally got my first response from their tech support yesterday (day 8 Tuesday) and they told me they are contacting the "vendor" to help with the database problem. Well, I don't know who they are trying to contact unless they have a support license with the MySQL Group, but it just reinforces that they have no one with MySQL experience at GoDaddy.

I wish that I read this before I paid for registration and hosting with Go Daddy. When you call for customer service (not toll-free), it takes at least 20 minutes for the reps to solve the simplest problems. There is no way that these reps received any training because I ask questions that everyone in the company should know and they become confused. They gave me incorrect information and messed up my account and told me that I had to pay more money for them to fix the problem that they caused. I wrote a letter to their president and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. Make sure to file a complaint with the BBB if you are ever treated unfairly at your financial expense so that this doesn't happen to anyone else. Go to www.bbb.com. Search for Go Daddy when you get there. Their state is AZ. Better luck with your hosting in the future

Well like you said, they do have domain registering, perhaps that's about all they are good for. I've had them for a couple of years now in that respect. Doesn't require maintence, and I'm happy. You will find this though even when you travel to other companies. You will have a very hard time finding anyone who seriously cares about your work as much as you do. It's unfortunate but true.
As for the Better Business Beareu people reading should note that this should be used only in extreme cases. It becomes a problem when everybody who can't get their page to refresh properly calls the beareu and sends a note to the president.
And your going to get what you pay for... sometimes less, as seen here.

When you call Go Daddy for customer service (it's not toll-free), it takes at least 20 minutes for the reps to solve the simplest problems. They gave me incorrect information, messed up my account and told me that I have to pay more money for them to fix the problem that they caused. I wrote a letter to their president and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. I haven't heard from the president yet but I am done with the company no matter what. We have to start reporting problems regarding hosting companies with the BBB, www.bbb.com, because when only one person complains, the host companies don't care and just blow us off. But if we start holding them accountable for unmet promises, they will start to give more consideration to good customer service. I'm not sure what company I'm going to next but I will cancel with Go Daddy in a few days. If they have any decency they'll give me a full refund. I hope you're having better hosting luck than me

Oh, it's nice to be surrounded by people who hate the same things, isn't it?

Seriously, I love GoDaddy for registrations, but when it comes to hosting, they've really blown it. Use it for your simple html page, but don't think you can waltz in and get any kind of database work done without doubling your dev hours.

Right now, I'm going back and forth with them, because in Perl, using their hostname to try to connect fails. I pinged the hostname, and got a 10.x.x.x ip, so I plugged it into the script instead, uploaded it, and we're finally connected.

So far, the e-mail response I received was downright mind boggling. They answered the wrong questions a couple of times, and at the end there was a helpful link on setting up php and mysql. Was this a hint or just stupidity? I told them from the start I was working in Perl. So for fun, I opened the help file (not really knowing PHP) and copied an example. After correcting a typo in their own example, and uploading the file, the PHP version works just fine with the hostname. it's only Perl that doesn't resolve it properly, so I'm wondering if they have a faulty Perl installation.

So back to the database. You can't connect to the DB remotely, so no 3rd party software to keep you too efficient. No, you HAVE to use their PHPMyAdmin browser tool, which is SSL encrypted, and you wait (no exaggeration) 5-10 seconds at least for even the most simple page loads. It's an unattractive, and unintuitive tool, and it's cost me money because I'm not getting paid for my extra time on this project, I gave a flat bid assuming the hosting company would have its act together.

GoDaddy hosting also uses sbox, a cgi wrapper that takes the most powerful parts of Perl and shoves them in the attic, out of reach. Even htaccess (yes, an oldie, but a "goodie" for this particular application) required tech support because there's no way to find the full path info to your site on their servers.

Well, there's my rant. Tomorrow, I'm actually advising my client, who paid a year in advance, to cancel and move to a different host. It's ridiculous to jump through so many hoops for a simple CGI project. Ooh-ooh, hackers are spooky, yes I know - but some security measures go too far. The only way you'll ever be completely secure is to pull that grey wire out of the back of your server, and then no one can get in. I hope GoDaddy takes my advice, and "pulls the plug".

I have also heard from others (2 people I know and 3-4 people in other online chats/boards) that GoDaddy hosting is quite awful. I use GoDaddy's domain name registration services and think they are awesome in that regard too, but will not use their hosting services after the bad press they have had.

If you are looking for a reliable web hoster with Php, Perl, Python, CGI, MySQL support, you could try looking at linsignia.com. I have been with them for 4 months and have been happy with them, at least up to now!

I have previously been with AITCOM and ValueWeb and they were not VERY good. Nothing terrible about their service, but I wasn't really happy with them, especially considering how much I was paying for their services compared to linsignia.com. I didn't feel like AITCOM and ValueWeb gave me a good deal to be honest. I am not suggesting that Linsignia is faultless, they have not been that awesome, but the best hosting company I have used in the last 3-4 years (not including my free college web account.

Just thought I would spread the love. Linsignia's parent company tends to use Linsignia hosting services mostly just for their consulting clients. At least this is what I determined from a conversation with a tech support representative when requesting SSH access.

With all of my trouble with GoDaddy, at least they refunded me all of my money. I wrote an email to the president and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. The president's office was pretty courteous and eventually gave me a full refund.

this is dead... a month old

just now, after 3 1/2 days in frustrating hell, Go Daddy scalation people tell us that they made and update to their server and this was the reason for one of my sites was out during all of this time

The new server software doesnt complies with standards and the directive "php_value display_errors off" on .htaccess made the server crash my html pages with a 500-server-error but php pages work fine

GoDaddy was good for us during years on domain registration, but their hosting service is the worst i knew

here is one more story about godaddy hosting support ...

I request to GoDaddy support how can i reset to zero my stats (visitors, pages views,etc) ... they don't understand well what i was asking and need to explain two times what i call "reset" or put to ZERO...

days passing and here is their answer 07/06/2004

"Thank you for your patience. To have your web statistics reset to 0 you will need to delete the contents of the '/stats' directory without deleting the directory itself."

Oh ! thanks ! at least ! but.... after i made what they told ... i had so many problems, days without any stats at al