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Why I Moved My Websites From GoDaddy

I’ve been a loyal customer of GoDaddy since 2007 — that’s 14 years, which is one heck of a long time. I’ve moved house three times, crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, become a grandfather, started three businesses, written a novel, and bought two motorcycles amongst many other things. GoDaddy however, has always been there, even in the days when the company’s identity was projected by pretty girls in tiny bikinis at motor racing events. Sadly, those days are long gone, but GoDaddy does still cling onto some outdated practices, namely their software and technical support.

GoDaddy Technical Support

On the whole, the tech support chat system has helped me, but the entire process is incredibly time-consuming, that’s if you can initiate a chat in the first place, bearing in mind that it’s your last and probably only means to achieve a solution. Many are the times that I’ve spent literally hours hanging around on chats, either waiting in a queue or trying to explain to the agent in language that they could understand, what exactly my problem was. It all became a dreaded exercise in call centre futility which I later only relied on if I was simply unable to resolve the issue through my own blood, sweat, and tears.

GoDaddy Support Forum

The other avenue is the so-called community, a forum for customers to share problems in the hope of finding a solution — a forlorn hope in almost all cases, because the solutions are almost always a link to an FAQ buried somewhere within the bowels of GoDaddy’s humungous system.

Duh! I wouldn’t be on the forum if the FAQ had provided a solution, would I? In the end, most of the posts were coming from other customers in the same boat, or could that be a lifeboat? Anyway, I wasted more hours of my life in that forum than would reasonably be expected for anyone’s sanity.

GoDaddy Losing My Payment Information

I have been using PayPal to pay for hosting and other products at GoDaddy for more than a decade, but recently I’ve had to go through the entire process of setting up a new payment method every single time I needed to renew a product. Then PayPal wouldn’t set up correctly, which then required a chat with tech support, at which point I was ready to start strangling someone.

GoDaddy’s Servers Are Way Out Of Date

I’m talking about the MySQL servers which are still running version 5.6 and after extensive chats and forum posts, I was informed that GoDaddy didn’t have a roadmap for updating to version 5.7. This prevented me from updating the software on my Expats forum due to timeouts and the deliciously sounding error of “The MySQL server has gone away.” Gone where? On walkabout?

GoDaddy Is Soooooooo Slow!

Everything about GoDaddy takes far too long to load, including the client area and cPanel, but in the end, I suppose you get what you pay for. On the other hand, now that I’ve completed the migration to ProStack, the difference is night and day. All my websites load in a flash and even members of my forum have commented on the improved loading times.

I’m not normally in the habit of bashing companies and to be fair, GoDaddy’s systems do work and I’ve learned a lot along the way. However, it’s the same old story when dealing with massive corporations — the human element has gone away. Gone walkabout, you might say.

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