Paul Carbo Web Design & Development

Maybe it’s me, but I seem to have abnormally horrific experiences with pretty much all of the major companies I rely on for things such as my internet connection, my cell phone service, my electricity and most recently, my web hosting. Now, you would think that I would hold the companies such as Verizon and Comcast at a much higher standard than I would a company which costs me a little under 5 bucks every month, but for some crazy reason I don’t. It is GoDaddy that has frustrated, angered, and ultimately disappointed me the most.

In America, for a company to become successful, and remain successful for a decent length of time, they need only be superior in one of three categories; product quality, affordability, or customer service. The average American consumer doesn’t mind paying a little more than they need to if the product and service is well worth it. At the same time, some are content paying as little as possible while settling for all-around sub-par quality. Some will deal with an average product at a higher price, just because they enjoy the experience of doing business with a certain company. I fit in the last category of those who don’t mind incredibly poor customer service, so long as I am getting the best product available at a very fair price.

I totally understand why Comcast puts no effort into increasing the quality of their customer service. Why would they? Regardless of how shitty I get treated every single time I call with an issue, I am still going to pay my bill every month. Why? Because, none of my other options provide a comparable product at a fairer price. I’m not going to pay twice as much to download at the same speed with Fios and I’m not going to deal with the hassle and horrible quality of switching to a satellite provider. I am stuck with Comcast. They win. They provide the best product for the money and know it. Fair enough.

A company like GoDaddy is an entirely different situation. By no means, do they offer a superior product, nor are they any more affordable than their competitors. Well, they must have stellar customer service then right? Nope. Not any more. At one time they did. Almost showing boobs in commercials is great for getting attention, but customer service is why they became such a success. They provided a decent product at a very good price but more importantly made the process of getting your own website simple and enjoyable. But all that is gone now, and if they don’t start focusing their efforts where needed, their success will soon be very short-lived.

By now I would have thought, and sort of hoped they would calm down with the sleazy marketing campaigns, but they just keep at it. The reason they worked initially was because of shock value, now it’s just creepy. Every time I see one of their commercials, I can’t fight off the mental image of what must have went on in Bob Parsons’ office in order for one of those girls to be granted the meaningless title of a “GoDaddy Girl.” He’s just a sleezey looking dude, and seems to look that way intentionally. Hey, more power to him if the girls are cool with it. I just think it’s become really weird. I mean, who is their target audience? People are so much smarter now, and the internet makes it so easy to shop options that I just don’t know who they think those commercials are working on. Horny adolescents are usually the wiser nowadays when it comes to the web, so it wouldn’t be smart shooting for that demographic. They obviously are ignoring women all together. So who’s left? Grown men? Grown, single men maybe? Grown, single men who are virgins and still live with mom? Sure, maybe those ads are most appealing to that confined audience, but how many of these guys are actually in need of their own website? They have no time to maintain their own website, there’s endless amounts of porn out there and never enough time for it all.

Don’t get me wrong, I have respect for companies that make such strides strictly due to clever marketing. Geico is a great example of this. They became popular solely because they had the funniest commercials on television. However, they became successful only because they offered a decent product at an extremely fair price. Their customer service isn’t anything special or any different than any other insurance company. People only call on their insurance company when something bad has taken place, so there’s no point in trying to provide the customer with an enjoyable experience. They just need to do their job, and handle the situation like you expect your insurance company to. People already know they’re getting screwed every month when they pay their premiums, but it hurts a little less when it’s a cute little gecko that’s doing the screwing. Geico is a company that is going to be providing cheap car insurance, and funny commercials for a long time to come.

In all ways possible, I just see GoDaddy not being any kind of competition anymore. Their service is mediocre compared to what’s out there, and in some instances more expensive. This would be manageable if they were focused on excellent customer service, but they’re not. Not even a little, tiny bit.

Do some Google searching for host review websites, there are tons of them. The best part about these sites are the actual user reviews. Granted, you have to try and filter out the spammed comments, blatant ads, and biased opinions, but one thing you can’t help but notice is just how important a web host’s customer service is to so many people. Easily more important than features, uptime percentages, or even price. I’ve read countless reviews of people either saying something along the lines of, “I called, and was connected to an actual person within minutes and they solved my issue with no trouble,” or “I called, and waited on hold for 20 minutes only to get the one person in the world who knew less about databases than I do, it was horrible!”

There are so many companies offering shared hosting now, they have to be competitive to stay alive and the differences in space, bandwidth, features and price are becoming slimmer and slimmer. The one, single thing that is really setting apart the good hosts from the bad hosts is customer service, and that is the great benefit of a free market economy with many companies all heavily competing for your business.

GoDaddy seems to be missing this or ignoring this. The latter is probably truer and it’s probably because like all other big companies they feel they are too big to have any reason to compete… especially with companies only a fraction their size. The problem with GoDaddy is they seem to have forgotten that they need to remain competitive in at least one of the three aforementioned categories. If not, they’ll be very surprised when they find themselves being bought out by one of those tiny companies that recently wasn’t considered any kind of competition.

I won’t even get into the outrageous experiences that have turned me so against this company, but trust me, I’m a pretty fair and rational person, and I do not exaggerate even slightly when I say GoDaddy is THE worst company I ever had to deal with. Like I said, I’ve been to war with pretty much every large company I ever received a bill from, and the accumulation of all those experiences is a minor skid-mark compared to the Jurrasic Park sized “pile of shit” that is GoDaddy.

My sincerest apologies to everyone I pointed in their direction.

The ultimate point of this post was to announce paulcarbo.net has officially cut all ties with GoDaddy and is now happily residing among the much greener pastures of FatCow Hosting.

Why did it take me so long to make the move? Who knows? Too many choices? Fear of choosing the wrong company? Not enough time to research as well as physically make the move? Laziness? Utter procrastination? What’s important is that I finally did make the move. Always better late than never.

Why FatCow? Well, to be honest, after looking into to so many companies and seeing so much of the same stuff, they were running a half off special for the first year, were offering all of the features I was looking for, plus their site was cute and clever and I’m a sucker for stuff like that. Most importantly though, they seem to take customer service very seriously. It’s obvious with a quick visit to their site, that your satisfaction is without a doubt, of utmost importance to them. They don’t just ask and hope for your trust either, they actually pledge themselves to you with a special oath:

HeiferCratic Oath

When you have a question or technical issue, you want someone to be there for you, with an enthusiastic can-do attitude. That’s just what you’ll find when you contact our friendly Moo Crew! In fact, if we don’t deliver a positive support experience, we will give you a free month of hosting. It’s that simple.

We hereby pledge to:

• Call you within the first seven days, welcoming you to FatCow.
• Answer your call in under two minutes, on average, each day.
• Provide phone support based exclusively in North America.
• Resolve your issue when you first contact us or set a firm deadline to follow up with you.
• Maintain a pleasant support experience by remaining friendly and courteous at all times.
• Adhere to the highest training standards, so the Moo Crew is always knowledgeable.
• Continually review and improve our support experience by sending you a follow-up survey.

If, at any point during your time with us, you feel that we haven’t satisfied all aspects of this oath, please e-mail us at oath@fatcow.com. A Moo Crew investigator will then review your complaint, and if we find that we’ve broken our oath, then I swear on my hoof that we will provide you with an account credit equal to one month of hosting.

Now that’s something to pay attention to. If any of what I wrote above is true, it’s companies like this, with priorities like those that don’t necessarily have to offer the best product, or even the cheapest price, but will always be successful.

Like I said before, people choose different companies for different reasons. Some don’t require too much and are content with what they get over at 000webhost since it is free. Others, have more robust needs, and also don’t mind spending 20 bucks a month to be cool, so they host with Media Temple. People like me are happy to pay a few bucks a month to get awesome service and a decent package and host with companies like FatCow, HostGator, BlueHost, JustHost, HostMonster or InMotion.

Since I am 2 days in to hosting with FatCow, I am not going to speak as if I’ve had years of wonderful experiences with them. I’ll be honest and say, since the move, I’ve been on the phone with them three times, and live chatted with them once. Besides being a generally inquisitive person, I always like to know what I am getting into so I ask lots and lots of questions. Bree, the girl I originally spoke to when signing up, answered all of them without once putting me on hold. She genuinely seemed happy to be helping me which was a refreshing feeling, coming from a conversation an hour earlier with GoDaddy, where I received no kind of straight answers and was made to feel like I was a nuisance. Since this was the first time I ever had to move a site, a blog and a domain name, I was nervous about the process and didn’t want to screw anything up. Another phone call to FatCow to find out exactly what I needed to be doing. No lie, I was connected to some tech support within two minutes. I kept this guy on the phone for about a half an hour, doing nothing but asking questions. I actually felt bad an apologized a couple times throughout the conversation. In great detail, he explained everything I needed to do as far as quickly re-registering my domain name, the best way to go about moving my blog and how to minimize downtime with my email accounts. After hanging up, I was much less worried about handling everything myself.

A day later my domain was officially registered with FatCow and it was time to set up my email accounts. While at GoDaddy, I had my email addresses all routed and hosted with Google Apps. I remember originally setting up the MX Records and CNAMEs was pretty confusing for me, especially without any kind of help from GoDaddy. One thing that was good was the online information explaining the process step-by-step specifically for GoDaddy. I knew there wouldn’t be anything like this for FatCow and was a little worried about making it all work. Well, why not really put their customer service to the test? So I gave them another call. It was explained that out of the box, I did not have the capabilities of custom DNS control and to add the functionality would cost me 30 dollars… but then, without me saying a word, he said, “But I just added it to your control panel, so you don’t have to worry about that.” I was taken back and confused. I asked him “So, am I going to have to pay for this?” He said, normally you’d have to, but I set it up already.” Now, maybe this isn’t that big a deal and they do this all the time, or maybe I shouldn’t be repeating it and making others think they shouldn’t have to pay as well. Either way, I came across what I thought was the first road block but seemed to glide right over it. He then gave me instructions on what I’d need to do, and let me at it.

While basically winging it from memory, I wasn’t sure if what I had entered in was accurate and didn’t want to wait the “48 hours” (actually 10 minutes) to find out that it wasn’t. I felt bad calling again, so I gave the live help a shot. Samson Brown was who popped on to help me, and besides having a pretty awesome name (if it was his real name) he was the biggest help yet. Without being super familiar with Google Apps, he seemed to understand what I was trying to accomplish. It turned out, what I had entered was mostly right, but to complete the process he’d have to make the CNAME changes himself. I guess I was able to point the subdomains to the various Google Apps, but wasn’t able to change the CNAMES themselves. Five minutes went by and I hadn’t heard anything from Samson. I checked the subdomains and all seemed to be working, including the email. Turns out, we had lost the connection and for whatever reason, weren’t able to be linked back up, but despite this little mishap, he seemed to do what was needed and gave me my beloved Google App functionality. That was that and with instructions given to me earlier, I immediately took on the task of moving the blog, which went a lot smoother than I thought.

So far so good I guess. Maybe I’m too excited and not used to this sort of service, which may very well be run of the mill. To me though, it’s much greater. No doubt that if I had to inquire as much with GoDaddy that I did with FatCow, the experience would have been very, very different.

Are you currently with GoDaddy? Need or want a new logo? A new Wordpress design? To keep the good graces going, I’m going to offer my services at a discounted rate of 25% to anyone who leaves GoDaddy to host with anyone else. Even though I am set up as an affiliate with FatCow, it doesn’t matter if you go with them or not. All I’m concerned with is that you bid GoDaddy an abrupt farewell. Keep the domain with them if you need to, just move your site somewhere else (we’ll just have to figure out a way to verify that you are actually leaving GoDaddy and not trying to pull a fast-one). It’s ultimately a win-win for you, not only will you get some good design work done cheap, you’ll also find yourself much, much happier with a new web host.