GoDaddy

First post of my new personal website/blog! Yay!

This domain (tuntis.net) was registered at GoDaddy in 2005. I also used their shared hosting for a year. This post is about my bad experiences with them and a generic complaint at their aggressive marketing.

To date, I remember all the extra products and ads they pushed at me while registering my domain. No, I don’t want e-mail hosting; I don’t want hosting… I just want to register a domain! After the registration, I used a free host for a while to host a very early personal website of mine. After that, I decided to buy GoDaddy’s Linux Shared Web Hosting.

That was a huge mistake. I’m sure you can find a lot of hateful writing about them already in the internet, but one blog post more can’t hurt.

Incidentally, I had trouble with my first blog I tried to install on their hosting package. That’s one of the reasons why I later moved to another host. I think that was WordPress version 2.1 or something.

Anyway… back to GoDaddy’s hosting. Here’s a small disclaimer, first: I haven’t used it in about 2 years. Things might have changed, but a friend of mine doesn’t seem to think so.

GoDaddy’s hosting control panel sucks. A really huge problem with it was that whatever you wanted to do, would get added to a queue. Any action usually took hours to execute (like creating a simple MySQL database).

Speaking of the MySQL databases, they were all hosted on remote servers (“secureserver.net”). I kept trying to install WordPress with the DB address as “localhost” before I even realized what I was doing wrong.

I recall having a lot of speed issues with these databases. And anything you did in the control panel seriously took an hour to complete. Sometimes even more, as I mentioned above.

I’m not going to get into much technicalities here, but GoDaddy kept dropping MySQL connections. I kept getting 500 Internal Server Errors.

So I moved hosts. But now, back to present day.

In December, Dreamhost (referrer link) ran a “get 1 year of hosting for 9$” promotion. I fell for it – and bought it for my small photography site that I had just finished. It’s been really great so far.

Anyway, I then decided to move my personal website (tuntis.net) to DH too (which you are now reading). When I went to change my nameservers at GoDaddy, I saw the following:

GoDaddy likes to advertise a lot.

This for some reason ticked me off. Sure, it’s just a small ad – but think about it. Do other domain registrars show you this? No, they don’t. Namecheap doesn’t.

I’ve decided to transfer tuntis.net to Namecheap once it’s about to expire and never use GoDaddy again. It’s not just the ads – but GoDaddy’s domain management interface is very bulky, too. And why would I keep maintaining 1 domain on another registrar instead of transferring?

But the ads are a major contribution in why I’ll transfer.

Hey! Thanks for reading this blog post by me. But before you go, please consider leaving me a comment if you thought the post was useful to you. Thanks!