One of the most well-known domain registrars, and purveyors of budget hosting, is GoDaddy. They run ads all over the place, and have done a good job at placing themselves as the #1 company newbies think of when they decide they want a website.
The trouble is, they tend to have bad customer service, and they seem a little shady. It seems that they
- Monitor domain searches run through their website, and register them themselves if the domain is percieved to be of any value. They park it and sell it for a lot for than their normal rate.
- Fail to renew domains, allowing “domainers” to pick them up.
- Arbitrarily suspend accounts and hold your domain ransom.
- Make it hard for you to move your domain to another registrar.
Plus, I don’t like their cluttered and spammy-looking website, but that’s irrelevant.
The enraged (former) GoDaddy customers have formed a community at NoDaddy.com. They’ve compiled a list of horror stories and alternative registrars, and have set up a forum where you can post your own story, or ask for advice if GoDaddy is being…bad.
EDIT: I later saw this post on the NoDaddy forum:
It is widely known that GD pushes the dedicated servers. I mentioned why in another post. Customer pays what, $120/mo for a dedicated host. Customer does not know that it is a $300-$400 shuttle box. And shared hosting is always slow, they max out the users (of course! that just makes good business sense). I think they have from 1000 – 3000 customers per host, but im not exactly sure on the figure. (Link)
That alone is bad. We all know that shared hosting is oversold, but GoDaddy seems to be on the extreme end of overselling (though Dreamhost is real bad about it too). And dedicated servers… Ugh. The low-end Shuttle computers are recommended for “basic word processing, e-mail, web browsing.” A box like that shouldn’t be used as a web server.
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