We have found ourselves moving websites away from GoDaddy hosting at a very rapid clip lately. We are just seeing too many issues, poor support and downtime to recommend that any business or nonprofit use them to host their websites. Your website is too important to leave at a mega-large company like GoDaddy that doesn’t really care about your organization.
If you’re thinking about hosting your website at GoDaddy, I urge you to reconsider. There are plenty of other great options out there that will give you better service and save you money in the long run. Keep reading for a few reasons why GoDaddy is not the best choice for hosting your website.
Let’s dig into why hosting your site at GoDaddy is a bad idea.
1. GoDaddy Offers Predatory Pricing
The way that GoDaddy structures its pricing is very misleading. They offer what appears to be a great deal on hosting services for the first year. But then they drastically increase the price for renewals – sometimes by 400% or more!
This pricing structure is predatory and takes advantage of customers unfamiliar with the web hosting industry. They make it very difficult for customers to switch to another provider, as they would have to rebuild their entire website from scratch especially if you aren’t tech savvy or working with a digital agency. Even then — we’ve often run into issues migrating sites off GoDaddy because we hit mysterious resource limits GoDaddy puts on accounts. More on that below.
2. Unlimited Storage and Bandwidth are a Lie
GoDaddy also offers so-called “unlimited” storage and bandwidth. But the reality is that they throttle your site’s speed if you exceed their “unlimited” storage and bandwidth limits.
This means that your site will load slowly or not at all if you get a spike in traffic. And since most people only visit websites that load quickly, regular outages and slow load times can frustrate your customers and have a devastating effect on your business. We often receive calls from people whose sites are showing a 500 error, and they did nothing wrong except experience a jump in traffic, which is typically a good thing.
Very rarely is anything truly “unlimited,” and this is one more thing to add to the list.
3. Customer Service is a Black Hole
Good luck if you ever need to contact customer support. You’ll probably never be able to reach a human being. And even if you do, they will likely be unhelpful and unable to resolve your issues.
We’ve heard numerous horror stories from our customers about trying to get help from GoDaddy customer service. Often, customers will get shuffled around to different teams or told that their issue has been resolved when it hasn’t.
When we’ve had to help our client’s who had their websites hosted there, we had to chat multiple times to get our issues addressed. We knew the server our client’s site lived on needed rebooted as its disk was full and we needed to delete some data. Despite showing all the data that this was the issue at hand, they merely went through their pre-written checklist asking us about WordPress plugins, themes and other irrelevant items. We asked to be escalated until someone rebooted our server. The good news is that we were able to get in. The bad news is that we only had a few minutes before we started getting the 500 errors we mentioned earlier. Frustrating.
4. GoDaddy Lies to its Customers about Site Performance
GoDaddy uses a marketing tactic called “upselling” to get its customers to spend more money. They do this by lying about the performance of their sites. They will tell customers that their site is slow or has errors when, in reality, it’s just fine. Then they’ll offer to “fix” the problem for an additional fee. We’ve seen similar issues with security and accounts being hacked.
GoDaddy has also been caught inflating its website speed tests, making it appear as though its hosting plans are faster than they actually are. This is a dishonest and unethical way to do business.
Site performance there is so bad is because they oversell their servers. They will cram hundreds if not thousands of websites onto each server. Each of those sites are competing for a finite amount of resources. If one site has a spike, or dozens do, that will quickly eat up the memory and CPU power, which means your site is going to be slow to be served. If one site gets hacked because its using out of date plugins and a bad actor starts a DDoS attack or sending out tons of spam? That’s right — your site could be affected.
5. GoDaddy Can’t Even Keep Their Own Data Secure. How Can They Secure Yours?
GoDaddy has been the victim of several data breaches, including a major one in 2021 that exposed the account data of 1.2 million customers. If your WordPress website is or was hosted there, you were most likely affected. From BitDefender:
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), GoDaddy revealed that it had discovered on November 17 2021 that an “unauthorised third party” had managed to gain access to its managed WordPress hosting environment.
Yeah, that’s not good. They are quick to promote services they offer to protect and clean your website, but it looks like they don’t follow their own recommendations. Heck, they even phished their own employees. It’s true.
Conclusion
In short, hosting your site at GoDaddy is a bad idea. Your site will be slow, you won’t be able to get any help if something goes wrong, and your visitors will suffer.
Many other reputable web hosting companies out there will give you better service and pricing, more reliable service, and more honest marketing. That includes us here at Gas Mark 8.
Contact us today if you’re looking for a quality web host that can offer fast performance and excellent customer service. We’re hosting over 70 sites for nonprofits, and we’d be happy to add yours to the list. We will also be glad to help you move your site away from GoDaddy for free!
