DISCLAIMER: I’ve never used GoDaddy so I have zero complaints about their service. And maybe other WP hosting providers have a similar policy in place but this is the one I just ran into when looking at their new pricing plans and I think it’s worth highlighting.

If you look at that pricing page, you’ll see one of the features GoDaddy includes in all plans is a 99.9 uptime guarantee (quite good since clearly a 100% is a panacea). But when I see this kind of guarantees, the question that immediately pops up in my mind is: so what if they break this promise? What’s in for you (the client that trusted his web, and with it maybe most of his business income, to them because of that uptime guarantee)?

Well, if you look their terms and conditions (section 7) you quickly realize that their guarantee is completely irrelevant since they can break it at basically no cost. In short, the hosting agreement says (my interpretation) that : they are the ones that decide when the uptime was less than 99.9, not you (and btw, they are not responsible if the crash was because things “beyond their control” or due to the “reliability of certain programming environments” among others) and if it happens (not sure if they will send you an email alert since they are the only ones that can decide that it did) you can only request a 5% credit of your fee for that month and must use it to buy other products from them.

Looks like a good deal to me. Maybe I should start making some promises myself, break them and entice you to buy other products from us at a 5% discount.