I have a new home on the web. For the past few months, I’ve been hosting the site with GoDaddy.com. I had been hosting my DNS with them for some time and was happy, so after they added .NET functionality to their < $10/mth hosting plan, I jumped in head-first.
My problems started early. First, they had trouble getting my parked domains added to my account. I would set them up, and from what I could see, everything was OK, but any request to the domain names would time-out. Support was OK. They were a little slow to respond — anywhere from 8-24 hours — and the first-tier support would simply quote the FAQ in response to all my inquiries. (Which, from the perspective of a former support person, is something I always wanted to do.) The second tier support could usually fix the problem, but after a few days, it would go back to not working. Anyway, after months of on-and-off-again service, I finally got that resolved.
Then I tried installing some blogging software. At first, I tried .Text, the software that powers the MSDN blogs. Well, it required some permissions that my user didn’t have. After futzing with that for a couple days, I gave up for a while. When my friend Aaron asked about the blog, I decided to give it another try. Another software package — probably scavenged off of SourceForge — but the same result. The permissions weren’t set-up correctly.
Well, your website doesn’t do much good unless you can do something with it. So, I decided to go back to the PHP world. There are many excellent open source blog and CMS systems, and I figure I could pick up enough PHP/Perl to patch up the rest. So far, so good.
As a final reminder of GoDaddy’s incompetence, I was emailed a link to a survey after I cancelled my account. My first reaction was, “What have they done to warrant my time?” but that quickly gave way to, “Why not two minutes to vent; even if it winds up in somebody’s trash bin?” So, I clicked on the link, answered the questions, vented in the comments, and submitted my survey. This response says it all: