April 16, 2007

GoDaddy review: very, very bad

GoDaddy.com is a leading web host and domain registrar, and I strongly advise staying as far away from them as possible. There are dozens of reasons here, and here's my personal tale. Earlier today I was trying to diagnose why a script I wrote was only working intermittently for someone else.

Bottom line: it wasn't a problem with my script, it was a special feature with GoDaddy's hosting that their "support" completely failed to tell me about.

Details: I was pretty sure there wasn't anything wrong with the script itself, yet it only worked once every three or four times. The script was designed to pull XML files from Amazon webservices via REST, and even when I changed it to pull Sun's or IBM's homepage it didn't work well. I called GoDaddy "support" and asked them to take a look at it. No matter how many times I asked (very many), they flat out refused to look at it, or even tell me whether something could be wrong with their PEAR setup. I then tried with Curl, and that didn't work either. Their "advanced" team put a mailer script in the user's account and, after determining that that worked, informed me that the system was functioning properly and there was nothing else they could or would do.

Finally, I did a search for 'godaddy curl', and found this and this document:

help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=288

As it turns out, GoDaddy uses a proxy with Curl. Wouldn't you think their "support" - after I explained to them what my script was doing and especially after their "advanced" team had been informed of the problems - should have told me about this? What would almost any other host do?

My GoDaddy review: very, very bad.

Posted to Miscellania at April 16, 2007 02:14 PM