Time for a PSA...

Most of us who have been in the industry for more than a year or so know this: Avoid GoDaddy.  But every now and then, I figure people need a refresher course, or at least another case study...

A client of client of mine was running a small, simple website on Go Daddy hosting.  It seemed easy, it seemed to work, it wasn't that much more expensive than other options out there that they didn't know about at the time.  Advertising works, I'll freely admit it.

Earlier this week some telemarketer from Go Daddy called the client's admin assistant, asking if they'd like to commit to a 5 year agreement on the site, or some such sillyness.  Said assistant said thanks but no.  The sales flunky clicked on something, next thing ya know, *poof* the site's gone.  Probably was a mistake, but there ya have it.  A sales call was made, the answer was "no," the site was gone.

Much hand wringing and teeth gnashing followed.

Go Daddy promised to restore the site from backups. Both my client and her client believed this.

A corollary to the rule of "don't trust backups you haven't previously tested:" Don't trust backups from a provider that you're not paying for backup service.

Sometime later that night Go Daddy mumbled something about mysql issues.

My client was brought in to try and help, as she had designed the site. The client had made too many changes since she last touched it...I mentioned google's cache and they managed to get the content back.

...a few hours ago Go Daddy managed to get the site back up while a replacement was being staged.

I first realized the evils of Go Daddy when they temporarily yanked insecure.org's DNS several years back over a silly complaint from a 3rd party...the NoDaddy website was formed as a result of that, and I've avoided them like the plague ever since...