There have been way too many times over the past year that we have been approached with simple website requests that companies want to change their website with some simple customizations and they are stuck with their GoDaddy hosting account. The company owners, managers, and digital business development representatives have called other web development companies and have run into a development and performance wall. After the other development companies have told them to switch hosting, these companies are deep rooted in their GoDaddy hosting (possibly because they paid for 2 or 3 years of hosting) and for some odd reason or another have been misled to believe that they have the best hosting where they are at. If the other development companies just spent a little more time explaining why GoDaddy has a crap hosting solution, these companies and potential clients would have been off to changing their websites much quicker. Instead, we have had this conversation with the client and gained the client. After talking to them for a bit (which client understanding is huge at Atwoodz), they were led to believe by a GoDaddy rep that they would have everything they needed with their website and they would never want for more. Bulllshit!
GoDaddy is a great domain registration company and that’s it. They have a great brand because of some risky (socially risky), but ingenious ads that garnered them national attention through Super Bowls, NASCAR and other TV opportunities. They have a great customer service response and their phone support is awesome as well. So why are their hosting problems?
Simple. Just as they have those catchy ads, they have a catchy sales pitch. Use our Hosting and you’re set. But most of the people who register their domain names for the first time, don’t know anything about what a web host is, or if they do, it has nothing to do with server load, site load speed time, shared resources and server access. They quantify it with a cost and no knowledge. If you do get a call from GoDaddy staff and you confront them about any of these issues, they dismiss them as frivolous concerns that you don’t need to worry yourself with. And that’s fine, if you expect only 2 people to visit your site in an hour. But the minute there are a few people on your site and you are making changes to something as simple as your WordPress blog, you then see your site time out and a 500 error or something else preventing your pages and content from displaying. That makes it look like you are pretty much out of business or have no idea what you are doing in business.
When you have that initial phone call or sign up for hosting during the lengthy domain registration process that offers you all these additional services you don’t need, there was nothing mentioned to you that your site was on a server with a few hundred other sites and that you are all sharing the same resources. And why mention it? Most people will set up a business and website and they will fail within the first year if not the first few months. But the few who do make it through and start to get their business rolling, still don’t pay attention to the hosting package they have prepaid for over the next 2 years at a heavily discounted rate. So as that business grows and gets visitors to the site, the online experience begins to slow down and then the company needs to add some features to the website to speed things along. If you have access beyond a GoDaddy WordPress hosting package, you can do a little something about it. Otherwise you can add a plugin or two to your site to compress some files, but you are still left with the same crappy server trying to process those commands and the rest of the shared server pack’s websites doing the same. Which is pretty much a bandaid and your site is still slow rolling.
Now you want to do some additional changes to your website to make your company stand out from the rest of the run of the mill pack and you try to get access to the programming side of the site and you don’t have that. That’s where us and most development companies shy away from any businesses hosting with GoDaddy. We would charge double the price to work on GoDaddy hosted servers because of their cumbersome system to access the site and change the files. And their system wasn’t designed out of security concerns, it was built with the sale and the control of the sale first, then their integration into their other services they have no business offering (marketing, web design, consulting – we’ll go over these in another article or two). So you or your developer are now trying to get the account upgraded to an account you can access, but that takes a day to do and a day’s loss of profit and a week of aggravation that you can’t quantify to a dollar amount. Their polite phone reps don’t understand any of this because they have never run or owned a business, so they keep with the script and assure you the top tier hosting package is what you need. But as you find out, you are still on a shared hosting system with a few less websites on that server a little bit more resources. But you are still confined to that limitation to PHP versions, shared space, and limited knowledge base to get the issues remedied with any custom code added to your site.
And so the issues go round and round with your hosting package. At this point the IT blame game goes on between GoDaddy (who are coached to deny everything), your web developer and your marketing company that has been complaining about page speed and hosting since day 1. So rather than have this guaranteed script go on and on… Don’t host with GoDaddy! There are plenty of hosted solutions out there for you. We offer custom hosting (let us know if you need a hosting rescue or website development), Nexcess offers great hosting packages as well as plenty of other companies that specialize in hosting websites and businesses that are designed and supported to be successful. And not the ones they prey on that will fail like most. So you can see where GoDaddy will make their money. Charging up front for extremely subpar hosting packages for businesses that are just going to fail anyway. It is a great business model for them, but for those of us who want to succeed, you need to look elsewhere and not fall prey to the failing demographic that is GoDaddy’s target market.
We’ll give you more insights in the coming months on the perils of hosting with GoDaddy and other issues that developing businesses run into on a daily basis that continuously lose them revenue.