Time for a new host
I’ve been hosting my personal sites with GoDaddy for a few years now and for the most part, as long as I didn’t want to change anything, I had no problems. Making even the simplest changes however could result in all my sites being offline for days however and yesterday I had enough.
Friday morning I tried to upgrade my account to take advantage of SSH. No big deal right? Their online tech support told me it would take about an hour and before I started I needed to delete all of my MySQL databases. OK, weird, but whatever. So I did so and made the switch. Within a few minutes a messages appeared in my control panel that indicated that the sites were down due to a pending account change and would be up in 24 hours. Well, they told me an hour but whatever. It was cheap so who am I to complain. After all, this isn’t the first time they’ve put me in a similar predicament.
So last night, about 36 hours later, I realized my site still was not online. Now I’m a little angry so I call tech-support on the phone (not a fun task) where I am politely told that it could take up to 72 hours to activate SSH services on my account. Now this wouldn’t be too bad if the sites were available during this time but as I indicated earlier I was required to delete my MySQL databases so they were all down.
Anyway, I tweet my frustration on Twitter and within a few minutes @GoDaddyGuy pops up saying he has seen my problem and is sorry for the frustration. As a fix he was going to simply create me a brand new account so I would be back online last night. OK, cool. I was pretty impressed with the proactive tech support and sure enough within a few minutes I had a new account listed in my control panel. I went to set it up as I was asked to do however and here I hit another road block. I can’t set up a new account when there is an account already in place for my domains. Hmm. So I call tech support and ask for direction. I didn’t mind deleting the old account, but I wanted a full backup first just in case. GoDaddyGuy indicates this should be easy and have someone zip my data and I should continue setting up the new account which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
So after waiting on hold for about 10 minutes I explain my situation to the guy on the phone who tells me that my predicament is impossible. First, they don’t have the capability to archive my data during the SSH upgrade and second, they don’t have tech support on twitter. WTF? Then who the heck got into my account and set up another hosting account. After putting me on hold a couple more times it turns out there is twitter support, and that as the twitter support is separate from the main tech support they have the capabilities of archiving my data during the transition and I was promised numerous times that this would be accomplished within the hour.
As of this morning still no archive, and more importantly, still no running sites. Time to go. I can handle bad support as it seems to be indemic to many of the hosting companies. I cannot however handle being lied to.
After a little more research (I keep up on hosts normally, but haven’t had to actually make the decision to switch in a while) I decided on Bluehost. They’re only $4 a month and the reviews are great. In fact when I signed up for GoDaddy I almost went to Bluehost then but decided to stick with GoDaddy as it was cheaper and I had had a positive experience with them as a registrar.
For now it looks like Bluehost is going to be great. Setup was easy, changes are instant, it’s a lot faster than GoDaddy and they seem to have a much happoer following than GoDaddy. Hopefully that will continue to be the case for some time to come.
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