Geek Daily

After nearly a year, with GoDaddy’s shared Linux hosting, I am moving on. I couldn’t be more relieved.

I have blogged about some issues I have had with GoDaddy in the past and some I have kept to myself. Now, it is payback time. I am doing this review in hopes that you won’t have to endure the ill treatment that I have experienced.

I haven’t posted at all yet this week. That is because I have been busy moving all my sites over to my new host, HostGator. HostGator be warned in about a year you also will be getting a review. Don’t worry, if the last week is any indication you will be getting a glowing review. It has been great thus far.

I’ve been holding off writing this review because I didn’t want any trouble from GoDaddy until after I was completely off their servers. Call me paranoid but I have heard horror stories.

Other than the fact that their shared servers are absolute crap, it started, and ended, with GoDaddy trying to block search bots with hidden robots.txt files. Note that I did not create this file and it was there from day one. This was the first issue and it never got resolved. I tried many things to get Google to index my site but even replacing the hidden file with a file giving wide-open access wasn’t even enough. All the while, GoDaddy denied that the hidden file existed even though you could browse to it but it didn’t show up in any FTP client.

I have avoided contacting GoDaddy customer support, there’s an oximoron for the ages, because frankly they don’t seem to know what they are talking about. The one time I contacted them was about problems with trailing slashes on rewritten URLs. I ended up getting far more help from other slighted GoDaddy users in various forums around the web. Their support people blamed me and said my code must be wrong. Again this was never resolved.

These two cases are mild compared to what some have endured. Needless to say, I am not going to wait around to find out if it’ll get worse. I have moved to a new host and am very happy. I can sleep at night again without worrying if my site will get suspended for having an opinion or if my visitors are being thwarted by poor performance.

So long GoDaddy. I won’t be back!