What an embarrassment it was recently to have advised a client of mine to use GoDaddy’s web hosting services. I feel terrible for the waste of time it was for both her and I. I have used GoDaddy’s hosting in the past and was fairly pleased with the service although the site I was running there was a simple HTML site with some basic PHP programming. This past month I posted an offer to develop a self-hosted blog for someone for free provided they use one of my affiliate hosting links. I used a link to GoDaddy and reccommended them as a host. What an unfortunate mistake that was.

Let me take the time to apologize to this client for wasting a week of valuable time.

The reason for GoDaddy’s poor score in hosting? Two things:

1. Technical Support’s total lack of interest or motivation to even bother assisting with ANY type of support if Wordpress was not installed using their Control Panel’s one-click installation
2. GoDaddy queues ALL outgoing mail generated by your website for anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours. This was confirmed to me by two GoDaddy technical support representatives and a manager.

Now let me clarify the two points above. First of all I don’t by any means expect a web hosting support technician to fix my website, write or fix my code or do anything other than answer simple questions. However, when I had an issue with the email that Wordpress was sending out, the support reps there refused to even entertain the idea that there may be a problem with their servers or wouldn’t even bother to provide a reason for the mail problems. Their answer to me was that because I chose to manually install Wordpress rather than install it frmo their Control Panel that they are simply not willing to provide assistance.

My request for support came about because while installing and testing out a new Wordpress site I was

working on I noticed that the Wordpress generated emails such as the username/password emails, forgotten password emails and such were being delayed by up to 4 hours. This means that I would make a password request and then wait four (4) hours for that email to arrive. Or If I signed up as a new user I would have to

wait 4 hours for my confirmation email. I don’t know who has time to wait for crap like that but I don’t. Email technology is instant and I expect to receive instant emails. Well because my Wordpress wasn’t their Wordpress, they blamed Wordpress and wouldn’t help me.

To simplify the problem so even the lamest technician could understand, I visited the GoDaddy support website for formmail, and copied their example and set up my account to receive email and low and behold… the message takes 4 hours to receive. After simplifying the problem and demonstrating my issue, they acknolwedged a queue time of 10 min – 4 hours depending on the load on the server.

I don’t care how good or bad the rest of the hosting is, if my emails are going to take 4 hours on average then forget it. Granted this was their cheap hosting plan ($5/month) I still don’t think it is right to queue mail that much. GoDaddy hosting sucks and is not worth the time. They should stick to domain registration only and leave hosting to the pros.