We’ve written before about our issues with Godaddy hosting along with providing some useful articles on how to move emails and services away from them.
Each year we migrate dozens of clients away from Godaddy, and onto separate platforms. Some clients switch to our private client hosting, or switch to third party companies.
The clients we have migrated away from Godaddy are suffering from one of these issues:
- Slow or unacceptable website speed
- Frequent outages
- Outdated infrastructure
- Lack of customer support, customer support is unable to help
- Pricing or sudden increases in pricing.
We will detail and outline each issue below.
Website Speed
Website Speed is determined by hundreds of factors but for the sack of this article we will be focusing on one important metric – time to first byte. Of course, optimizing images, scripts and other factors will greatly improve website loading time but taking a look at the same website hosted on Godaddy versus a third party can really show the different
Time to first byte is a fancy way of saying how quick your server responds to a request initially or when you put in a URL into your browser – how fast the server can process the request and send you back the website.
This week we moved a client’s 2 websites away from Godaddy. The loading time was unacceptable, Godaddy customer support could only offer an expensive upgrade to help speed up the loading time. Both websites have very low traffic, and are very small in size. The websites have optimized images, scripts and are using Cloudflare as a CDN.
Below is the comparison between Godaddy and our private hosting. Both websites are setup the same and no additional optimization was completed.
Instant savings of 2 seconds.Â
Instant savings of 1.6 seconds.Â
Important note: The private hosting is a server with litespeed caching built in. The godaddy website was previously using W3 Total Cache. Both websites were heavily cached but using different methods. The websites have also now been optimized to be even faster.
Frequent outages
For most of our clients websites, we offer a backup and site monitoring package. This provides weekly or daily backups along with website monitoring. For our client mentioned above, they experienced daily outages across both websites from Godaddy
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Outdated Infrastructure
You may have seen our previous articles about outdated PHP warnings from WordPress. Unfortunately, it’s extremely common for us to login to a clients Godaddy account and find out their CPanel hosting account does not have anything past PHP 7.2 available – we have even encountered CPanel accounts that have nothing updated past PHP 5.6.
Of course, Godaddy will usually upgrade this for free if you ask but how many clients will ask their host to upgrade expired insecure extensions for their hosting account? Godaddy should be managing them.
Additionally we’ve seen clients who have had their website hacked from an exposed godaddy server, or outdated PHP setting. When these clients contact Godaddy regarding the hacked website Godaddy is quick to offer a security clean-up package of $100 to $1000+.
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Customer Support, or lack of.
The Customer Support is lacking at Godaddy. Don’t expect any real issues to be solved quickly unless you are lucky and find an agent that is somewhat knowledgeable.
This week we had a client experience a complete database loss from Godaddy on their hosting platform. Godaddy had lost the database for her hosting account. Thankfully we have backups available but we recommended that the client contact Godaddy to investigate the issue.
Godaddy insisted that the website was not hosted with them because the IP address does not match, and the website is hosted with Cloudflare. Now Cloudflare sits in between the visitors (your customers) device and the website hosting. It does not host websites but helps protect and speed them up. The IP address being returned to the Godaddy Service agent was a Cloudflare IP address that routed the user back to Godaddy.
The real issue? Godaddy had rewritten their Wp-Config file (how WordPress connects to the database) and had invalid information. They offered the customer a monthly service plan to prevent this from happening again.
This should be the basic understanding of any customer support agent at a hosting company. Godaddy refused to help the customer because of their lack of understanding. They refused to fix a broken database server, the client was paying for because of their lack of understanding.Â
We recommended Godaddy change the nameservers to their default setting and remove Cloudflare – they were unable to change the DNS on the domain.
If you don’t understand any of those terms above, that’s okay. You don’t work for a hosting company but if you work for Godaddy, you need to seriously learn about DNS and Cloudflare.Â
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Pricing
Godaddy has one major benefit, and it’s the price. The introduction price for domains is by far the cheapest we’ve seen online…. for the first year. After the first year, the price will typically skyrocket.
In addition, the hosting is more expensive than the majority of other hosts. Our clients typically save 30 – 40% yearly when switching to a new host.Â
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In Conclusion
This article may seem like a rant but it’s based off years of experience and frustration we have experienced. Our clients are angry with Godaddy, we are angry with Godaddy and the frustration keeps growing.
This frustration was the reason we starting offering Website Hosting to our clients 4 years ago, and we have moved over 100 clients away from Godaddy. These clients now enjoy faster website loading times, better security and customer service they can depend on.
