How GoDaddy Destroyed my Client's Site
I hate GoDaddy. I hate GoDaddy so much. I hate GoDaddy so much, I can't even begin to express how much I hate GoDaddy.
I've always considered GoDaddy to be the gutter trash of the web hosting world. Well, today they proved me right. Today GoDaddy completely destroyed one of my client's websites. Literally. It's gone. All 6127 files, images, presentations, and documents (and 3 databases).
For the record, I don't use GoDaddy. I never have and I never will. But I have one client that I do a lot of work for that uses them. I came into the picture after the fact and the site was already running on GoDaddy, and they didn't want to move. That's fine, I can respect that, and since all I would be doing is FTPing files up, it didn't seem like that big of a deal.
Today I got an email from this client requesting I look in to why their site was down. I figured that GoDaddy was just bouncing their server (they seem to have to do that a lot), but after a while when it still wasn't up I decided to log in to the oh-so-wonderful GoDaddy Control Center, where I was promptly greeted with the following message (which, according to my client has been there for at least 2 days):
Pending Changes to Your Account
There are changes pending on your hosting account.
As part of a continuing effort to provide the highest quality service for our valued customers, your hosting account has been migrated to a new server that will provide you with increased performance and reliability. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours from the time the update was completed for any newly-published content to be visible on your Web site.
If you have any questions, please contact customer support.
Um, ok. You're moving the site to a new server, and never once bothered to notify anyone that you were going to be doing it. It should only take up to 24 hours, but so far it's taken over 2 days. Great. Thanks.
To make a long story less long, they "moved" the site, but they didn't move any of the site's files! That's right, instead of a website, we now have a big empty folder where the site should be, with one of GoDaddy's stupid little "welcome" pages in it.
This site had a TON of legal and regulatory information on it. Literally thousands of PDFs, Powerpoint presentations, Word docs, spreadsheets and databased information. GoDaddy support couldn't care less. They have no interest in helping us, and apparantly consider their "site move" a success!
So, here I am at 11:00 on a Thursday night, FTPing 6127 files up to the website, hoping that I can get it partially restored. Even once I get all of the files uploaded much of the data in the databases is lost because I don't have any recent copies on my machine. Not that it matters, the oh-so-wonderful GoDaddy Control Center is still displaying that message so I couldn't get in and set up the datasources even if I had current databases.
I hate GoDaddy.
However I think you've only yourself to blame if this statement "I've always considered GoDaddy to be the gutter trash of the web hosting world" is true and you've ignored your instincts based on cost savings.
@Mark - I think their main concern right now is just getting the site back up asap, then we'll see about moving it. (I hope!)
http://corfield.org/entry/GoDaddy_and_ColdFusion_M...
It has over 150 comments from people mostly complaining about how poor GoDaddy's service is - and how poor their ColdFusion support is.
I still use them for a bunch of static sites where I want to keep costs low for friends but their aggressive up-sell/cross-sell tactics are annoying and their site is very hard to navigate and use effectively. But... you get exactly what you pay for. Hosting for a few bucks a month is cheap hosting no matter which way you look at it.
Hope you get your client back up successfully and I hope they now realize that they need to move their business to a business-class hosting company...
My reasons to GoDaddy
_________________________________________________________________
The whole response thing seems to be a joke @godaddy!! You guys have a limited vocab and repeat yourselves on every post with blah! blah!….. The customer spends a lot of time (10 times your support teams contribution on problem resolution) on providing details of the issue and your support starts with denial of the existence of any issue whatsoever… forcing the customer to spend more time to defend his case of the issues existence. Then your support team acknowledges the issue and express inability to confirm an eta and the mail ends with something like… please let us know if we can help you with anything else… finally you never come back with a resolution confirmation and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. I should know… coz i am on the receiving end.