GoDaddy
reviews and complaints

Godaddy just turned of my Website without any warning and deleted all my web files and is now demanding 150.00 to get my files back from a restore. They said someone(me) turned off auto-renew on my hosting plan which is not true. They are using this to EXTORT money from me to get my websites back up and running. I have been a customer of their's for over 10 Years! BEWARE of Godaddy's practice of revenue generation at any price to the customer's well being.

I have a yearly subscription to the GoDaddy Webuilder program which is used to create and maintain a website. The program has had consistent problems all along and it is difficult if not impossible to get GoDaddy to resolve the issues. The mobile website does not present properly; improperly highlights menu items; highlights menus options for pages other than the one you're on, etc. I have spent more than two months trying to get GoDaddy to resolve this issue. Throughout, I have been lied to, given wrong information, provided dead links to open repair tickets, repair tickets closed without being resolve, told the issue was resolved when it still remains and generally blown off with no resolution. Their technical service is deplorable and designed to run the customer around in circles.

The product sold does not provide the services GoDaddy claimed to provide, i.e. a properly functioning website. I have been more than patient but the presentation of my mobile website is unprofessional and no longer acceptable. GoDaddy refuses to provide a repair timeline and in essence after two months, is refusing to correct the problem. I have invested more than 100 hours in creating this website and have spent at least four hours on the phone over the past two months trying to resolve this issue. The services offered and paid for are not the services that I am currently receiving. I have paid for a properly operating website and I expect to receive a properly operating website, particular given the enormous amount of time I've spent in creating this website.

ff

GoDaddy used to provide an email account with all domain name purchases. They no longer do. They now try to sell you on Office365 for $47.88/year. What a ripoff for people like me, who only need one email account associated with their domain. They also don't tell you about this policy change up front. You find out afterward, when the only free option they give you now with the domain is 100 email forwards. That's completely useless, since you have to sign up for their $47.88/yr Office365 plan to even take advantage of the free forwards. They still have and maintain videos all over the Internet instructing you on "how to set up your free email associated with your new domain"! That is very misleading and false advertising. I had a live chat with a Customer Service person named Shauna, who repeatedly apologized, but seemed more interested in getting me off the text window than offering solutions. I let her know that I'll be purchasing my domains elsewhere from now on, and she apologized again and asked if there was anything else she could help me with. Way to lose customers GoDaddy.

Worst Service I ever had..
worst service..
worst and uneducated support team..
no words..
just telling other's mistakes, not giving us support..
Just waste of money, time..
Not providing any support..
you can contact me and i will give you all proof..
Dislike from my side.

I had bought a Cpanel Hosting With this company,
nd they send me NS Records.
I had already update that in my domain.
but
Their NS having Wrong records. but they just looks other faults.
They dont want to help..
not even listening my words..
as a customer they don't even listen me..
What a award winning customer service..
Clap for that..
they just give a excuses but not the solutions..

Dear GoDaddy.com

I herewith regret to inform you that we absolutely despise your service. Unfortunately, your very competent sales person advised that we rather pay upfront for the next 2 years. What a clever tactic, here we were thinking of saving a few bucks. Never once did we suspect that your motives were to trap us in your evil claws.

Since we are losing tons of money due to email downtime, I asked one of your consultants if I could get my money back because your service is NOT working. I mean, surely if you buy a TV and it does not work, you should be able to get your money back? Right, I mean, that kind of makes sense… I was very politely told that if I read and understood the refund policy, your company would only refund me in “GoDaddy.com Dollars.” This clearly is not a refund as it forces us to spend money with your immoral company again. The reason we want to leave is because your service does NOT work…

You guys need to understand that email downtime costs your loyal clients’ money. We are a business, we are not friends sitting around a camp fire. If your service does not work, it affects our staff and their families. They work 100% on commission and rely 100% on email. Obviously, you guys don’t know the importance of production in a third world country. We can’t afford to lose even 2 hours, let alone 2 days.

I have spoken to more than one consultant over the past 2 days, in all cases I was told to gently sit back and relax… Why don’t we just go on holiday until it’s resolved? This is somewhat difficult when you can’t conduct business during one of the busiest times of the year… As a direct result of your downtime, we are losing clients and other valuable business. Our service gets rated negatively as people do not believe that our emails are not working. I mean, why would they work, we are an online business…

So then, it comes to complaining. I have sent in numerous complaints via your “Survey”. I have not once even received an acknowledgement of receipt… Wow, that’s really professional… I also left a negative comment on your Facebook, only to discovery that you your deceitful company only approve positive comments. That says a lot…

I find it ironic that your Facebook cover page says “The least stressful part of your day” – According to me that is the worst statement I have seen in my life. I’m about to get a stress related heart attack directly as a result of your email downtime.
Nevertheless, hey, at least I have a large following of local web developers, graphic designers, SEO consultants, etc. I will make sure that I spread the word. I will share my story…

I am EXTREMELY disappointed that a company as established as Godaddy.com cares so little about client satisfaction and basic uptime…

Hoping that you resolve your issues as soon as possible.
Regards

A VERY dissatisfied Customer

I have been a loyal GoDaddy customer for 7+ years. I signed up for their old Windows Grid Hosting a while ago and I was very pleased with the service I received. I wanted a cheap option to host ASP.NET applications with up to date associated features (IIS, SSL, ASP.NET Version etc.)

After renewing my hosting every 3 years, I noticed that I would save 200% if I let my hosting plan expire and sign up with a new account! I contacted GoDaddy support to see if they won't renew me at the same price as (lets be honest) it would save both of us time and effort. They refused and told me they couldn't do this, so I gladly opened a new Windows Plesk Hosting Account. As my applications run under IIS8 locally and target the ASP.NET 4.5 framework already, migration was not a problem and went rather smoothly.

I did notice that the Windows Plesk interface timed out quite a lot... As this is the only way to configure virtual directories and set file permissions, it became frustrating quite fast! Also, I noticed that FTP transfers (50.62.160.28 server in question) timeout A LOT! I'm left with SO MANY partial file transfers. I contacted support about this on the 8th of December 2014, but they could not offer a solution. My websites were also running twice as slow as before with the Grid Hosting... I came to the conclusion that they are overloading these new servers with so many new customers that they are prone to spammers/large file hosters/DOS etc. I figured that eventually these users will move on, so i'll stick with it for now...

After the migration to my new Windows Plesk Hosting Account, I noticed that I was rarely receiving HTTP 503 Error's with my web applications. I try to stop or restart the application pool in IIS8 and I get this error: http://consumerhorror.blogspot.com/2014/12/godaddy-cannot-stop-or-recycle-app-pool.html. For some reason, I do not have permission to stop or recycle the application pool. Weird! I contacted support about this issue but they didn't offer me any solution!

The web applications run fine locally and on HostGator. The applications are not triggering IIS' Rapid Fail Protection and it's not using hardly any resources or memory. GoDaddy will not offer me log files (They say that they don't keep them?) or anything to help me troubleshoot the issue. Their standard reply seems to be: "Your application needs to work on II8" or "There is a problem with your Web.Config and we don't troubleshoot scripts". Seems like an easy get out for them, but this was not the problem. So I pushed a little harder for a solution...

GoDaddy support has this to say:
Devin -
They are stating the app pool is running now. If you have them backed up you could to a total reset of the hosting account which could get rid of any issues but I'm checking with them to see if we have any logs that would tell us why it was reset.
Devin -
They stated that you'd want to set the trust level to full. They also advised that part of the issue could be an app that doesn't match the .net version.

I had already told him already that it's a simple .NET 4.5 web application with no extra trust requirements. So In GoDaddy's world... Give all your applications full trust or perform a full reset of your hosting account? Anybody with 1% knowledge of IIS/ASP.NET would fall off their chair at this advise! He then followed up with this response...

Devin -
I do understand your situation and I really apologize for the trouble. If I had a way to provide you those logs, I would. Unfortunately, we are unable to do so. We do not have logs for these errors. I really do wish there was something more that I could do for you, but we have reached our limit. There is nothing more that we can look into on this issue and we do not have any extra information to provide.

So GoDaddy has left me with 5 of my hosted domains all pointing to a 503 error which I'm unable to fix as I have no Admin privileges and no access to the IIS logs (which apparently they dont have?! That doesn't even make sense!). As a loyal customer for 7+ years, are they really that stupid? I am actually really confused about their business policy and how they treat their most loyal customers. What do they actually expect me to do now?

I mailed this as a formal complaint to GoDaddy and BBB.org on the 14th of December 2014. I would like for my web hosting to work as it should (with HostGator for example), and I would expect the service I'm paying for.

As of December 15th 2014, GoDaddy has yet to respond.

All,

We are small website development company - Veritus Solutions - based out in Gurgaon, India. We are customers of godaddy. We are using hosting services of godaddy.

We are writing to make everyone aware that how miserable and pathetic services that godaddy provides in India. Also, we want to highlight how the customer service representatives are callous and insensitive to end users.

We have been hosting websites on Godaddy servers and suddenly all the websites are hacked by some one known as Azade (turkish hacker) on 11/17 at around 2 PM IST. Attached are the screen prints of few websites.

www.protonactive.com
www.gogreentower.com
www.hotelsukhmani.com
www.bondsmanservices.com
http://www.muneshsnackscooking.com/

We have been chasing up with customer services in India since then but no luck. Initially, Godaddy executives were in denial mode and were not agreeing that there is an issue at GoDaddy end. They keep on insisting that there is a code issue and we have done something wrong and deployed the wrong code. They asked us for USD 150 per website, if we wish to recover the websites. But after our insistence and spending more than 4 hours, Godaddy executive named Mr. George agreed that there is an issue at Godaddy servers and administration team is working on it. Even he mentioned, that same issue is being reported by other customers as well.

Godaddy able to recover few websites till midnight of 11/17 but in the morning servers are being hacked again. When we called Godaddy, Mr. Manjeet Rai mentioned that godaddy has done whatever they can do and they cannot help us any more. When asked if there is any escalation path or can we contact his supervisor he said, Escalation path or escalation email id doesn't exist and he cannot provide his supervisor’s id. He said that he cannot help us.. And that’s it...!

Its very sad and disheartening to see that executives of MNC company behave like this. They don't understand what issue customer is facing and they cannot even help customers to resolve it.

We have been chasing down by our customers repeatedly and its more than 18 hours that our websites are down.

We demand that stong action should be taken against goDaddy so that they show some commitment to end users.

Hoping to hear from you!

P.S Some of the websites we are able to recover by deploying backups, which are not latest. there are lot of re-work needs to be done:(

Oh God! what a terrible service and a way to extort money out of a customer.
i had purchased a VPS [Virtual Private Server] from GoDaddy a few months ago which was hacked by a Pakistani [Anti-Indian] hacker. I asked them to help me and they just refused.
Following which i did not renew my VPS services [Anything Anti-India does not go down with me at all] and GoDaddy just shut it one day and now not returning my own data!
i spoke to the customer service a few times with a standard reply: We can not help you in this unless you renew your VPS.
My Big Question is: Am i not entitled to a copy of my own data if i dont wish to renew the services?

i am sure Modi Govt will take strict action against such un-ethical companies operating in India.

Extremely Disgrunted Customer

Hi Support,

I am using Godaddy since 2 years now, I am having 3 accounts in the name of calderatech.com, delsatinfotech.com, electroneuralgroup.com. I also have several other domain names attached to these hosting. Last year I had problems with the mails that got solved only after 3 .. 4 months. This year I am having problem with one of my domains biryanixpress.in since 3 months now and no one is bothered to solve my problem at your end. List of my problems,

1) I have renewed the plan with the present price still it is showing it is in the old hosting plan.
2) Though my website files are running in my another account(http://rkmvvmmalda.in/) which is again with godaddy itself, those same files are not running with my biryanixpress.in account.
3) The files are written in asp.net which are not running at all and showing errors.
4) Whenever I am asking for help and saying its running in another godaddy account why not this one they say it’s your problem and we cannot help you.
5) I have no doubt about my coding they are running ok in another account ie. (http://rkmvvmmalda.in/).
6) After talking to me for like 40... 45 mints. Suddenly the connection gets disconnected every time.

This cannot keep going. I need an answer and some solution Shortly or I am bound to transfer the account to some other hosting company.

Hoping for a change in attitude.

Tarashankar Bakshi Gupta.
[protected]

This mail summarizes all we have to say about the very poor (twice in two months) service received by the Customer Support of godaddy.
An amazing waiste of time (one hour of conversation).
Guido Simonetti

From: Guido Simonetti
Sent: giovedì 4 settembre 2014 13:28
To: [...]
Subject: Your support

Hi,
just for the sake of providing you support, so that next time you can help customers, I forward you information we had to download from Internet given your total absence of support.
I’m filing a complaint for having waisted one hour of my precious time only to hear you saying: “We don’t care about your problem”.
Best regards,
Guido Simonetti
CEO NetArtis
http://help.squarespace.com/guides/domain-mapping-with-godaddy

They canceled one of my
domains that was up for auto renew even though my credit card onfile is good.
They never called or emailed to let me know they were canceling it and all the
sudden today, I received an Email from them saying it was canceled.

I spoke to support for a
while and they couldn't figure it out. They said they left me 3 voice messages
which I never got and Emailed me cancellation notices which I never got. Even
though I receive everything else from them, including a notice last month
stating that the domain would be automatically renewed.

Support did say that
they use different servers and that some are blocked by AOL so maybe I didn’t
get their cancellation Email and that the voice messages are computer generated
and don't always leave the message correctly.

Also, the credit card on
file is my Amex which I have not had any problems with but the guy said
sometimes when they charge Amex they have problems. That is not my problem or
fault. Regardless they should have called or Emailed me to let me know this.

Bottom line, I caught it
in time but they still wacked me 90 bucks for a ".COM redemption
fee".

This is not fair and I
will be reporting this to every agency and bogging it everywhere if someone
does not call me and fix this

GoDaddy Customer # [protected]
I am writing a letter of complaint for the loss of my account and domain with domain and web hosting service from GoDaddy. This was due to an error with their auto-renewal function on my account.

I opened an account with GoDaddy on 10 May 2012. I bought a .org domain and web hosting for two years with an indefinite auto-renewal. They took the money from my PayPal account and I received their services.

On May 10 2014 – the day of my renewal – there was an error with my PayPal account. (I have had no problems before of since with any other payments on this account)

I was sent six emails from May 10 to May 20. However, these emails were sent in Dutch (apparently my account was set to Dutch but because I only used the WordPress part I did not see this), and I was at that time travelling in the US (California – flight to LA on evening of May 9, next day May 10 (day I received first email from GoDaddy) I took a flight to Sacramento, and was travelling for two weeks with little or no access to email.

On top of that I had previously been sent many emails from GoDaddy - for special offers on and on, and two to update my domain address holder details if they had changed – they had not so I did not respond. I did not received any emails about my account renewal coming up – which I do from other domain providers that I use (Fabulous and FastHosts, also my personal web hosting account also lets me know renewal of domain and account are upcoming 60 days in advance) Not so from GoDaddy I only got Spam from them.

To sum it up:
• On the day of my renewal May 10 2014 I received an email about the error and then 5 emails after that ending on May 30, which I never saw. They automatically went into my spam trash.
• I was travelling in the US from May 9 to May 24 and did not have access to email during much of my stay. I have airline emails to prove it and have proof of where I stayed and traveled.
• I then traveled to the UK on family business. I have airline emails to prove it.
On June 8 I was told by a friend that the site was down.
I immediately tried to contact GoDaddy Support. Here is what I found:
• The local number was only in Dutch and only asked questions – there is no support from this number. Although this is what it says on their site: 24/7 Support020 7979 2661.
• I did not find a support contact right away on the site but found a support email address via google search: [protected]@godaddy.com.
• From [protected]@godaddy.com I received a no-reply email saying I would get no reply from that address and was a given a number to call in the US.
• I found a local number on the site but it was out of commission I later found this was apparently the wrong number – so I called the US number for support.
On speaking to a support person named Nick I was told I was given plenty of notice via email and that I must renew my domain at full expense and pay to have my site restored as I should have of course backed it up (in his words). When I said the emails were in Dutch when I had found them in my spam I was told my account was in Dutch and I should have it in English. He then told me that if I waited for my domain to be freed up I could expect a company to have already bought it and try to sell it to me for I assume a higher price. Basically he said I had to pay up or lose my domain and site data.

I have three domains currently and two websites. I use Fabulous and FastHosts for my domains and JustHost for my websites. I have renewed my accounts and domains on many occasions. Each time they send a renewal notice - in good time. They have impeccable support and I have no problem with these people.

I will have to recreate my entire site again from scratch and my domain according to GoDaddy support will not be free for another month or so.

I have found a number to call for the Netherlands but do not expect a better response.
I think that at least the cost of the backup of my data should be waivered as I set up this account in good faith, paid my bills, and set up auto-renewal. As I did not receive any notice that my domain was about to expire I was simply not ready or even away that I need to track the process.

Otherwise I am sure I would have found out much sooner that something had gone wrong.
I maintain this site for a non-profit spiritual organization registered as a stichting in the Netherlands.

My domain name was coming up for renewal and I had received an email from GoDaddy telling me the same. One hour and thirty minutes after I renewed it online through the GoDaddy website, I received another email offering me a 45% discount to renew my domain name.

I contacted the GoDaddy Customer Service and asked to have the discount applied to my renewal (which would have saved me a little more than $25) but they refused and claimed that once the order had processed, they were helpless to make any adjustments.

I asked what would happen if they (GoDaddy) had some how made a mistake and charged a client too much for a renewal, to which the supervisor I was speaking to replied; "If it were our mistake, we would do whatever it would take to correct it." So obviously they do have the ability to refund an overcharge, and you would think that they would have offered to do the same in this instance.

My advice to anyone using GoDaddy is to not pay your renewals until the very last moment. It is truly sad that people who try to pay their bills early are penalized by the marketing tactics of businesses like GoDaddy.

We purchased a VPS server named GVPS1 from Godaddy in December 2013
we hosted 3-4 websites on this server, since then we need to restart this server every 2-3 days
I called and talked to the Godaddy customer card and their technical so many times, even after this my server gets shut down so frequently. They claimed from next time such case would not crop up .
Because of this we can't give best services to my clients and at last I am going to switch to another web hosting company.

GoDaddy cheating and confiscates expensive domains2 weeks ago I registered the domain Jerusalem.Today. I fully paid for the purchase, and got the domain in your cart . During this time, I put on a domain auction Sedo.com and received an offer to sell for $ XX.XXX . But I decided not to sell this domain now, because I'm sure that the price is much higher.Today I received a mail from GoDaddy, which says that the domain name was sold to me by mistake, and it confiscated ! It took 2 weeks ! I could sell it a few times! Now what?Imagine that you bought a BMW dealer at a high price . Came home, riding a new machine. And after 2 weeks Dealer arrives, and while you're sleeping - car takes you saying that you have sold it by mistake ! And now just a machine for the money you will not be able to buy ! What is that fraud ? All experts say that so interesting domains GoDaddy steals from their customers and sell them more expensive to other people !Is it possible to do ? After all, for all of us Domain Registrar - it's like bank where we store our investment ! And in this case, our bank robs us of our investment ...I will refer to lawyers in Europe and the U.S., I will not let this . 2 weeks GoDaddy took my 5 new domains : Emirates.Today, Bitcoin.Today, Exchange.Today, Medicine.Today and Jerusalem.Today!I strongly recommend to all - do not register new domains have GoDaddy! They are thieves !

Watch out if you do business with one of the biggest domain name scammers on the planet - Godaddy.com. If you choose to do business with these charlatans watch out for the AUTOMATIC RENEWAL. Unless you turn this function off, you will be billed without your knowledge. This happen to me and I am currently asking my credit card company to get involved to reverse the charge. Calling customer service was NO HELP. Very rude and uncaring. Now we understand how they can afford 4 Million Super Bowl commercials. BUYER BEWARE!

GoDaddy's hosted email exchange has been broken off and on for more than 2 weeks. I finally called today after my frustration reached the boiling point. Their customer service is pleasant enough, but after 3 calls, not being able to send, receive, or read my corporate email, I'm beyond frustrated. They don't know when it will be back online, don't display it as an outage on their support site, and tried to convince me to upgrade to Office 365 because it's more dependable, and has all these great features. Up until 2 weeks ago, I was perfectly satisfied with what I had. Now? Unbelievable. Disappointing, GoDaddy - very disappointing.

Run away from Godaddy!

After choosing Office 365 to have my website and email boxers, I cancelled the services (site and email) I had with Godaddy and, by coincdence, my problems begun.
It is clear for me now that Godaddy main objective is get money from customers by all the possible ways.

I had also bought 5 domains and all with expire dates of end 2014 and one till 2015! Now they say I "deleted" the domains and they got expired!

After several support tickets exchanges they insist that I most recover the Domain I wanted more (with expire dates in 9/14), and pay 80 $ for that.

One of us (me or Godaddy) is stupid!

I would be stupid if I wanted to delete registered domains I paid in advance and not expired
or
Godaddy is stupid to think their customers want to drop money away.

Godaddy site allows, without an alert giving the criticality of the action, to delete already paid registered domains ... and after they ask money for recover. This is stupid and non ethical!

I am a 61 years old economist and former CIO at important companies where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was priority number one. An acronym that Godaddy does not know!

They lost my entire database.
They had my website down for an entire week.
When I called about these problems - all I got was their sales team trying to sell me more stuff. Their response was - "we'll give you a credit on your next purchase".
They just don't get it - there isn't going to be a next purchase.
They have cost me a lot of money.

I wouldn't use go-daddy if they were the only hosting company on the planet. It's like driving with a bagel wheel. It's like never taking the training wheels off your bike. It's like always being the bridesmaid - never the bride. It's like being third to second fiddle. It's like going window shopping without being able to buy anything. It's like always being a spectator in a participant sport.

The mistake I made was not reading all the bad reviews about them. I would have never used them.

I won a domain on Godaddy and received an email I had until today to pay. I went to pay today and received notice that they gave the domain to another bidder today. I called customer serive and they couldn't help. Totally disgusting.
Additionally, even though the email told me I needed to pay by today, Godaddy not only awarded the domain to someone else, they also have put my auction account in suspension and are demanding 10 dollar for admin fees.
So they're trying to punish me for their own mistake.
http://imgur.com/8YtfJgK