GoDaddy has long been a staple in the domain and website hosting market for many years. Over the past many years though, they’ve gotten increasingly worse in customer service and price. There are many alternatives that people are happy with, and I’ve tried many. Several years ago I moved most of my web hosting, and the hosting of most of my clients and friends, off of GoDaddy’s terrible hosting services, but I’ve left domains there. (And so have many others.)![no-godaddy[1]](http://onebadlung.com/wp-content/uploads/no-godaddy.jpg "no-godaddy[1]")
Last month I had my final bad experience with GoDaddy. A single website I’ve had hosted there for 5 years, that used little storage space and had almost no traffic, suddenly disappeared. As it turned out, it was my fault for not renewing the hosting (or having auto-renew set). This has happened before, and I have been able to successfully login, pay for the hosting for another year or two, and the site was back up shortly. This time though, there was no renew option. I called GoDaddy’s “customer service” to find out that the hosting had expired over 20 days ago and they deleted the files. And if I wanted to get the site restored, it would be a $150 ransom. I talked to anyone I could, but they simply chose not to help without charging that outrageous fee. My fault or not for the renewal, they are a large company, with millions of websites a lot of technology in place. Their choice to abandon a customer has only served them in losing my business and anyone I help with domain and website hosting… and anyone else I can convince to choose another company. You know the saying “vote with your dollars.”
Right now, my favorite website hosting is BlueHost. But when it comes to domains, I’ve been looking for the best price, best control panel and fastest updates to DNS. Well, along comes Google. They recently joined the domain registration business. At this writing it’s still new, so I can’t judge how quickly they update DNS or how their customer service will be, but I’m hopeful. Also, they’re initially charge $12/yr for domain registration, so we’ll see how that changes over the years.