You can put up with a company who provides domain services to thousands of customers but don’t ever buy hosting wth them. Unfortunately, Go Daddy, a trusted domain provider, is taking advantage of people calling to renew their domain by up selling hosting not needed or wanted. They take your money and run.
Here’s a sad story one of my clients is going through right now. Five years ago, my client purchased a domain at Go Daddy as many people do. Then she hired me to create a website, still working today and hosted at Blue Host. Last week, she called Go Daddy to check that her domain was up-to-date and paid up. The domain is on auto renew, but Go Daddy took advantage and sold her a five year hosting plan. She paid them $99 additional to migrate the website to their server and they put it in a folder called “CloudTech”.
This came to my attention this morning when this client forwarded an email from Go Daddy listing suspect malware files in a folder named “CloudTech”. Not smart if you want your wily ways to go undetected by the webmaster…! Not smart to call attention to your own malware. Here’s the details. After a short conversation with the client, and logging into her account, I called Go Daddy immediately. I received a call back from Sales and Security nineteen minutes later. The tech guy explained that CloudTech was legitimate and informed me the site had been migrated over. Confused, I exclaimed., “This does not make any sense, since the domain is still pointing to BlueHost…!” Before instructing him to remove the folder I wanted to call the client to get her permission.
And the story gets worse.
Not only was the client duped into the extra hosting and migration, she has been paying them yearly hosting and SSL fees for at least a few years. Why do they take the money if there was no website being hosted? ….Because they can. Many people don’t know the ins and outs of internet set up and will pay what a large commercial company asks for. The tech guy’s excuse for the recommendation? The server was old and needed to be upgraded to php 7.0. Again, I pointed out, that BlueHost had already upgraded, so the website was fine. The old server they were referring to is theirs…
Lesson to small business owners: If you wonder why you are paying for hosting in two places, please contact your webmaster. If you are given an option to pay more money, consult with the person who knows what you need. There are 164 one star reviews of Go Daddy at Consumer Affairs. Posted, are many similar stories. It is unconscionable that a company with Go Daddy’s resources and reputation is taking advantage of small businesses.
Addendum: I spoke with another Go Daddy associate today. He has cancelled the hosting account and the ssl and returning almost $300 to the client. I doubt that this includes the migration fee of $99 however. I’m also giving free hosting to the client for the rest of the year to make up for some of her lost revenue for the excess hosting. Lesson learned: add a line to the contract that clearly states where the fees should be paid.