No Daddy, Please, No! 7 Reasons to Avoid GoDaddy

GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar in the world with almost $1.4 billion revenue gained in 2014. Apart from registering domains, GoDaddy offers Web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, SSL Certificates, Emails and even a website builder.

For an average, non-technical person, GoDaddy may seem like a good deal, especially with their powerful (often very controversial) advertising campaigns. It’s incredibly easy to get cracking, register a domain, install WordPress and you are ready to do business (this is what they claim to do). But, there is always a “but”.

In this post, we are going to reveal 7 reasons why we moved our website away from GoDaddy and why would we encourage you to do the same.

1. The Speed

As most of us already know, website speed is a critical part of the overall user experience and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) performance. Google has confirmed that website speed is a ranking factor, and is no brainer that fast loading sites have an advantage over slow ones. Furthermore, users wouldn’t usually wait for more that 4-5 seconds for your website to load.

From our experience, GoDaddy doesn’t do this job well. We’ve found GoDaddy’s hosting relatively slow compared to its rivals like Siteground, Hostgator and Immotion Hosting.
There was an extensive performance research carried out by WPSiteCare where GoDaddy showed pretty poor results.

You can’t even imagine how many times we were on the phone with GoDaddy’s support team who claimed that there were no performance issues. But, the devil is in the details, and you will understand why in the next few sections.

Our Website Speed on GoDaddy’s Hosting:

Our Speed after migrating to Siteground:

That said, they do care about their own website speed…

2. Oh, that SSL Seal

Have you ever used this “SSL Badge/Seal” provided by GoDaddy?

If so, did you run your website on GTMetrix, Pingdom or Google Speed Insights straight after?

Were you “lucky” enough to see this kind of errors?

What we’ve found out is rather interesting. Apparently, this “badge” creates extra “handshakes” with the server which slows downs the entire website and makes it “unreadable” by GTMetrix, Pingdom or even Google Speed Insights.

It took us a week, and ~10 helpless GoDaddy telephone calls to realise that this badge was simply killing our performance. Furthermore, to fix this, we needed help of Moz Community, and here is a response from one of the community members:

To add on to SSL, GoDaddy’s WordPress Hosting does not give you full control over your SSL certificate. We had times when Moz’s “Roger” bot/crawler couldn’t access our site due to 804 HTTPS (SSL) Error, which appeared to be coming from an SNI SSL technology used in shared hosting. Although this was a limitation from the Moz’s crawler, we have been advised to disable the SNI, which, as you can imagine, was not possible with GoDaddy.

3. WordPress Updates

Not sure what’s wrong with GoDaddy, but our WordPress was automatically updated 2 times (without prior notifications), and twice broke our entire website.

The first time, not sure how, but our database was erased completely and we couldn’t restore the site with GoDaddy’s backup option. It took more than 30 hours for GoDaddy to respond to our “escalated” enquiry, and eventually, we’ve fixed the issue ourselves.

The second time, we already knew what’s going to happen and prepared ourselves.

After moving to Siteground, we’ve always been notified of the WordPress updates and haven’t seen any issues since.

4. Support…

When it comes to GoDaddy’s support, we have dual feelings. Overall, the support is somewhere below the average but isn’t terrible.

Here is our breakdown:

20% – Good Support that fixed our problems
30% – Satisfactory support and helpful answers (i.e. GoDaddy’s support team gave us some helpful advice that led to problem solving)
50% – Useless and Helpless answers (often hysterically funny)

GoDaddy offers 24/7 telephone support, which is very handy. But, the fact that GoDaddy removed their “online chat” can be slightly inconvenient for some people.

GoDaddy, bring back your online chat!

5. That Funny PHP Error

After another sudden WordPress update, we were “lucky” enough to see the following PHP error:

Then, during another “joyful” 60-minute telephone conversation with GoDaddy’s support representative, we were able to persuade them that the issue was coming from their end. Obviously, not without the help of WordPress Community.

In fact, what I liked the most about this conversation is that the support guy said “There seems to be an issue with your PHP on line 520” :), well, apart from the obvious “insightful” response, GoDaddy was able to fix this problem by doing a full account cache flush.

So, If you happen to be in this position, ask them to do a full account cache flush and read this WordPress Discussion.

6. They sell too much

Although GoDaddy may seem affordable or sometimes even cheap, it’s not true when you stick with them for some period of time. They sell too much, and everywhere you go they follow you up with “great deals” and “low prices”.

Every time we’ve contacted GoDaddy’s support team (I’ll put emphasis on “support team”, not the “sales team”) we’ve have been offered another month of hosting or email renewal. This was very frustrating to say the least, as you are expecting your issues to be solved, and not another service sold.

7. The Ads…

Different people have different opinions on GoDaddy Ads. Some people think they are sexist and even disgusting, and some believe they are funny. You be the judge.

To Conclude

Considering all of these issues, we have decided to move our website to Siteground. Since the migration, we have not seen or faced any issues with our website performance and felt like this was a smart business decision to make.

We understand that different people have different opinions and may not have faced the same issues, but we would encourage you to review your current website performance and make a decision that is best for you and your business. This post is purely based on our own experience/opinions and if your site is running smoothly on GoDaddy with no issues, there is no reason to migrate.