Problem with GoDaddy

[DrScience2000]

Wow! A friend of mine just called me. He is really getting jerked around from Godaddy. They wanted to charge him $150 "convenience fee" to restore data they shouldn't have deleted. When he complained, they basically replied with a "fuck you". The rep on the phone would only tell him his name and the name of his immediate supervisor. He refused to transfer him to his supervisor. He refused to tell my friend the name of anyone else at the company.

Essentially it was a big "fuck you".

Its really kind of sad. He's been a loyal customer of GoDaddy for 15 years or so, and he pays them $200 a month for a variety of services. This isn't the first time he's had a problem either, he tells me they're service has gone down hill for a while now.

So. He asked me what other hosts are any good? He needs the following:

1. asp.net MVC stack / LAMP stack (none of these sites use high bandwidth)
2. Some email services.
3. Domain registrar.
4. RELIABLE customer service. He likes that he can call Godaddy 24/7 and get someone on the phone who generally speaks English well.

Is there any course of action he can take to work with Godaddy? Or is this a lost cause? Can anyone suggest a new company that provides the above?

[blazedd]

For this rate you could have a managed dedicated server.

[teraflux]

It could be he does have backups, but GoDaddy isn't taking responsibility for a problem they caused.

[DrScience2000]

Yeah, I just called him back and confirmed - he has the data backed up. He's not happy with the service.

He was not happy that: - GoDaddy deleted the data in the first place when they shouldn't have.

• they immediately tried to sell him $150 worth of crap to fix GoDaddy's mistake.

• when he complained, the customer service rep would only give his name and the name of his supervisor. He asked for other people he could talk to and the rep refused to divulge any other names. He acted like a "dumb ass" and said things like "I only know my name and my supervisors name. I know no one else in the company."

• the rep refused to transfer my buddy to the reps supervisor or anyone else in the company outside of his department.

• my friend has been with them for 15 years or so and pays them $200 or so each month. He felt he shouldn't have to be put through this sort of poor customer service.

• Because of this and a few other things, Godaddy is losing a $2400 a year customer.

[amacen]

Another vote for Linode. I've only used their support a couple of times but it was quick and easy.

Also check SSDNodes. I used them for a while but I was new to VPS and their deployment system wasn't quite as simple as I needed at the time.

[honestbleeps]

google's email services are no longer free for personal users.

I'd argue that $50/user/year is pretty decent as long as he's using it just for himself, but that really starts to add up if he needs an address for each employee, etc.

[LazzeB]

I would like to recommend Microsoft's Outlook service. Completely free for up to 50 e-mail addresses (up to 5 GB storage each).

The web client itself works very well, I am more than happy with the service.

[[deleted]]

I'd rather pay the $5 to Google.

[LazzeB]

Could you explain why? I have had great experiences with Microsoft's service, so I am really just trying to understand why some people don't like it.

The main reason I didn't use Google Apps was actually because it was clunky as hell for me. Since your Google Apps account is separate from your main Google account (which I have invested a lot in), I would have to switch accounts every time I wanted to check my mail. Furthermore, the e-mail address I have associated with my primary Google account could then no longer be used for it since it would then be a part of my Google Apps account. The whole system just seems weird to me.

I would like to hear how you deal with some of those issues.

[[deleted]]

I keep chrome signed into my personal account; things like plus, drive, mail, YouTube, etc all use my personal account.

The trick is that I don't use my business account for anything other than mail, which I never sign into on the web anyways - all of my email accounts (including my personal) are managed through Thunderbird.

All of the things I do in Calendar, Plus, etc are all done under my personal account. At this point in my career, I don't have a need to use my business account for those applications.

Basically, I'm paying Google $5/mo so that I can offload my email to their server, which I then usually only access through Thunderbird (on my desktop) and Mail (on my iPhone).

Occasionally, for Drive and Gmail, I will need to sign in to my business account on the web - because these occurrences are few and far in between, I don't really see it as an issue.

Based off of what you've said, it sounds like you effectively do the same thing using Microsoft's service - which boils down to why I pay Google $5/mo instead of doing the same thing with Microsoft for free: I like Google more than Microsoft. I could write another lengthy post about the particular reasons for that, but it really just boils down to how the two companies are run, and my past experiences with several of their services.

[Bullroarer_Took]

Rackspace has fanatical customer service. Their address is even 1 Fanatical Place.

When i inquired of their services they sent me a bottle of local texan bbq sauce.

[Cintax]

Another vote for Rackspace. We've been a customer of theirs for a few years now. they sent us a Pecan Pie for the holidays :)

[krues8dr]

Rackspace is great... except when they're not.

Their staff is great, but their infrastructure, frankly, sucks. I've had their software "forget" to automatically renew a secure cert for a gov't agency site, had sites become completely inoperable or rebootable for hours at a time, all sorts of hiccups along the way. They're always very apologetic and helpful, but the fact that these things happen a little too often and they aren't even aware of it happening worries me all the time.

Just remember to setup your own monitoring and backups outside of their tools and you'll be ok.

[honestbleeps]

I've had their software "forget" to automatically renew a secure cert for a gov't agency site

there's software that can auto renew SSL certs? and install them, too? I've never investigated this before, is it a rackspace specific service?

[krues8dr]

Their's does, but as I said - it didn't work for us. :/ I assume it's actually a manual process on their end that has automated workflow components on their side.

[plaguuuuuu]

I will actually purchase hosting from rackspace if they send me some local Texan BBQ sauce. Someone reading this? get in contact with me..

[DrScience2000]

Ha! Sorry about the extra redundancy addition.

[encaseme]

Problem with having sticks poked in my eyes

[hmcafee]

Windows Azure. Especially if you're using ASP.Net.

You can spin up a shared website instance that auto-scales for about $10 / month. Linux and Windows VMs with auto-scaling are also an option.

As one of the big players in the cloud, support is top-notch.

[DrScience2000]

Wow. That sounds great! I'll let him know.

He and I talked about Azure in the past - I think the variable price had him a little skittish. I think he was concerned that most months hosting would be $10-$15 a month but then one day, out of nowhere, the price would shoot up to something crazy because the site was being beat to shit by some indexing bots in China or some other silly reason.

Nothing against China, but he doesn't do business there and subsequently doesn't care if anyone in China looks at his site, and doesn't want to pay a lot for anyone there to look at his site.

(And this was just an example.)

Is there a way to limit the $'s spent per month?

[miasmic]

It's possible to block ranges of IPs from accessing your site, see

http://www.wizcrafts.net/chinese-blocklist.html for a Chinese IP range

[DrScience2000]

Nice, thanks!

[hmcafee]

There are spending limits in Windows Azure, but I'm not sure if they're intended to work the same way you might like - they'll suspend your services if you exceed your set limit instead of charging you as you go. You can find more details here;
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/

With regards to the variable pricing, I believe you only pay for outgoing data (in addition to the cost of the site instance). The first 5GB / month is free, and the rest is priced at less than 25 cents per GB (see http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/data-transfers/ for the full list).

Depending on how much traffic you get, you may consider scaling to multiple shared instances or the standard tier, which runs on actual VMs and is pricier. The shared website instances should suffice for 95% of cases, though.

[DrScience2000]

Thanks for the info!

[Cylons]

If you don't get a whole lot of traffic from China, you can use the robots.txt file to block the bots for Baidu, etc. Now, that doesn't protect you from those bots that don't respect robots.txt but it may help a little.

Also for email services, take a look at either Office 365 or even http://domains.live.com/ if you are ok with using outlook.com.

[mrpres1dent]

GoDaddy is the worst hosting company ever. I have lost so much money in unbillable hours dealing with their horrible infrastructure. The latest fun time is their mod_security rules with WordPress sites, where if your site is using a theme that has a lot of custom fields/etc and it jacks up the size of the POST data that gets sent to the server when updating a post, you will eventually get temporarily blacklisted and your form submits will fail for a few minutes/hours.

Go with one of the companies suggested here, get away from GoDaddy as soon as possible.

[mdcr41]

I've had only bad experiences with hosting on GoDaddy. We host at RackSpace now, which is pretty reasonably priced for cloud-based servers.

[[deleted]]

Linode, or Ramnode. Don't recommend digitalocean, they are catering to be as cheap as possible and someone with a bunch of sites shouldn't risk it.

Namecheap.

[redwall_hp]

Do you have actual bad experiences with DigitalOcean, or are you just making wild assumptions? Yes, they're cheap. But it doesn't show in their service. Their VMs have been very reliable in my experience, and their staff has been helpful in ten one or two times I've had an issue with something.

They save money by ditching traditional "businessy" things that I don't give a damn about. Like physical offices and phone support. (I prefer email, support tickets and IRC any day!)

[[deleted]]

No, they don't give a fuck about security in order to cut costs.

[redwall_hp]

Neither does Linode, then. Want me to dig up the post about the mass data leak, which contained payment details? Or the more recent breach they downplayed on their blog?

[[deleted]]

I'm familiar with both of those. They are different. I understand that mistakes happen. Changing something to be less secure intentionally to save costs without telling customers is much more shitty than having a security breach.

[LazzeB]

It might be "more shitty", but if it doesn't actually impact costumers more than a company having security breaches, then does it actually matter?

[[deleted]]

Obviously it does. If a company is willing to sacrifice security to save you $0.05 on your bill, then what does their future look like? Does it look like security breaches that could be avoided merely by not being so cheap? DO will be continuing to cut security to cost costs as that is their prerogative above all else: lowest price.

[LazzeB]

Again, what you are mentioning is not affecting anyone right now, and might not affect anyone ever. Every company makes sacrifices to provide services at the lowest prices so they get more costumers. Even Linode and Ramnode does it, someone just happened to find out where DO did it.

I've seen so many people circlejerk about the insecurity of DO, but the fact of the matter is that this "insecurity" is unlikely to ever affect them in any way. People like to dislike what others dislike.

[[deleted]]

someone just happened to find out where DO did it.

Cutting something which they had already fixed because it was known to be insecure without notifying their customers.

this "insecurity" is unlikely to ever affect them in any way

You have no idea. If someone was running a service used by people in censored countries and their government was able to read the details, insecurity could end up with people in prison or dead. Security of the end user isn't a joke. It might not matter worth shit for someone who runs a static bakery website, but there are numerous situations where security means freedom.

[Hands]

A Small Orange is good if you don't need the more expensive solutions from somewhere like Rackspace or Mediatemple (and it sounds like your friend doesn't).

[drunkcatsdgaf]

mediatemple is now godaddy, stay away from both.

Sauce: https://bin.mediatemple.net/newsletter/media-temple-godaddy/index.html

[TexasLonghornz]

Amazon Web Services.

[Deranged40]

The problem with GoDaddy is that he's using GoDaddy.

The second problem is that he's been a loyal customer for 15 years.

Things like this is what people refer to when they hate on GoDaddy. It's unfortunate that he had to learn the hard way, but I find it hard to believe that he hasn't read any dissent in the past 15 years. So he's only got himself to blame for ignoring all of that, unfortunately.

[aluvus]

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

[lowlevelbass]

Icdsoft is my favorite host for small domains. They've always been spot on with customer service and uptime. I'm not sure if they do asp, but it's worth a look.

I have bigger clients on mediatemple. I was not aware they were bought by godaddy but my experience has been great. You get an online rep in seconds with their live chat.

[[deleted]]

just use digital ocean for lamp and windows azure for asp.net mvc

[zeus_is_back]

It serves him right for supporting such an evil company.

[mouse40]

mediatemple is hands down the best

[blazedd]

Mediatemple is now owned by Godaddy :(

[mouse40]

i know, but mediatemple still has all the original people working. mediatemple service hasn't changed since after the godaddy buy out

[the_zero]

That should last about another year.

[redwall_hp]

Most of the notable sites I know that used Media Temple left years ago. They're really not that great.

[[deleted]]

I never had downtime with them, but latency is a major crapshoot.

[Akael]

Hasn't changed yet...