If you are here, you are thinking of leaving Godaddy and moving from Godaddy to a new hosting provider. So should you go ahead and move?

Let me preface this article by saying that I have used Godaddy services for over 6 years. Through both personal projects and client work in a professional capacity. All of it is written from first hand experience of using their services.

Godaddy is a huge domain and web hosting service, they managed to capture an enormous portion of the online market when it was booming. This has made them very complacent, the reason being that most of their user base is non technical.

Now a lot of people are left with websites that are very unresponsive, slow to load and lack the tools they need to thrive. The main issues people have with Godaddy are the following.

– Expensive renewals and add-ons

– Slow server speeds and website loading times

– Friendly but useless customer support

– Restrictive server settings

– Server downtime (website unavailable)

So how can you fix this?

Godaddy Renewals and add-ons

The costs of add-ons on Godaddy are quite expensive when you compare then to other providers who either offer free or low cost alternatives that do the same thing. You may be able to haggle prices slightly with Godaddy but you will likely still be paying over the odds.

Things like 3rd party SSLs and web security can at times conflict with Godaddy servers and be hard to manage. The official services offered by Godaddy are comparatively very expensive and often have less features.

They have positioned themselves to make any alternative add-ons other then their own just a bit to fiddly to bother doing, certainly in the case of managed hosting.

Godaddy Customer Support

Godaddy’s customer support is actually very easy to get through to, you can use phone, email or online chat and none of them make you wait very long. The customer service respresditives are very friendly and do appear to try to help.

But the customer service response you receive the majority of the time from Godaddy is to just to upgrade and pay more money and this rarely ever solves the actual issue you are having.

Anything technical you bring forward to them is never actually looked in to or resolved (or at least in my experience). If they can’t answer your question they tend to just send you off for 24 hours until changes ’take effect’.

So, in short, for renewals and customer service you cannot get around this without migrating your website to a new hosting provider.

Godaddy Server Restrictions

This brings us nicely to the server restrictions, these tend to be because you are on a managed package or shared server. This is black and white, there are no exceptions, so you will need to either upgrade to a self managed server with Godaddy (you will need some technical knowledge to manage this) or move to a new provider with a more feature rich managed hosting package.

Godaddy Downtime

This sadly is a common thing with Godaddy, some downtime is due to overloading on poorly managed servers. This results in your website being unavailable to your customers.

Then there is the downtime through changes on their side. This could be them rebooting servers, moving data from one server to another as well as infrastructure changes.

Now Godaddy claim on their sales page that they offer a Guaranteed 99.9% uptime. This from my experience is simply not true. I have had websites go down for a for a whole day with no explanation except ‘we are aware of the issue’. This has happened on multiple occasions on certain years. Even one day of the year alone means that the 99.9% uptime promise is simply not true.