PROS:

• Sometimes you can get a domain for $1.99 for the first year

CONS:

• The interface is confusing and counter intuitive
• From my experience, hosting is inflexible and they're resistant to help change advanced settings

My cons may seem minimal for my rating, but I dread doing ANYTHING to websites on Go Daddy - even if it's as simple as basic domain settings. When I log out I feel drained from looking at the overly-busy design, hunting for the settings I want in deeply buried options, and screen after screen of unnecessary secondary (and sometimes tertiary menus).

Bottom Line: No, I would not recommend this to a friend.

I don't host any sites with Godaddy but they are my registrar for all my domains. The only complaint I have with them is their website navigation it's not the most user friendly site to navigate.
Ever try checking out after purchasing something? They try and and offer you everything else under the sun before you finally get to the end of the checkout.

I agree with TechMate - all my domains are with GoDaddy. I don't use them for anything else. Their interface does take some getting used to and they tend to change it to something more complex every now and then.

If you just want to register a domain, I have no problems with them. Just make sure you don't accidently add on something else during the checkout process.

As a Christian company, we refuse to work with clients who are on GoDaddy hosting. Not for any technical reasons, but simply because all their advertising is based on sex and demeaning women, and they host a large number of pornographic websites. We couldn't resolve their company ethics to ours.

Companies who declare themselves to be Christian-based (and especially churches) need to look at their entire supply network, and only work with suppliers who have a similar set of aims.

We will happily work with clients to move their websites and domain hosting away from GoDaddy to a more moral company (not necessarily ours, although obviously we'd prefer that!). Whenever we have to access the GoDaddy website, we absolutely have to have images turned off.

My rating is one star only because we can't give zero. GoDaddy caters to a demographic that can never reflect christian clients, so never comes up for consideration here. There is nothing that they can do that we can't get done better elsewhere; perhaps not as cheaply, but what value do you put on decent morals and ethics?

Thanks for your review. To be honest, I had never thought of that, so I'm really glad for you to point such an obvious fault. I'll definitely have to keep that in mind in the future. Who do you usually go with for hosting?

Who do we go to for hosting? Ourselves - that way we're pretty sure we're hosting with a Christian company!

We're not the cheapest, by a long way - but we know all our clients by name, and they appreciate the fact that we just handle everything for them, including domains and hosting. We're not the best bargain for developers or clients who want complete control over the hosting themselves, because that's where we add the value, and you can get cheaper elsewhere (if you know what you're doing with hosting and want to do it).

btw - we handle everything for the clients, but we ensure that everything is owned in their name, so that if they want to move it's easy for them. We've had too many instances where we've had to extract clients (at their request) from obstructive hosts; we don't want to be one of them. By making it easy for them to go, clients tend to prefer to stay..

I have to agree with everybody else's reviews.

I haven't actually hosted any of my own projects on GoDaddy, but working with them for others has been quite a pain. The interface is confusing and they love to pop open new browser windows for different functionality.

In fact, I almost paid full price for an upgraded service package when I was entitled to upgrade for a small fee - but just couldn't find the right settings panel.

Overall, I've only used them when I had to help somebody out and they were locked into a long contract.

Hi Peter,

Where on your site do you offer web hosting?

I use GoDaddy for my domains. The number one reason is that it is easy to manage them. I like to redirect my domains to specific places on my sites. With Godaddy this is easy because of their control panel.

What are the options for having a service like Godaddy for domain management with morals?

Tim

Tim,
There are a ton of Domain Registrars out there. I personally don't use GoDaddy for anything - including domain registration - because their website is slow, is confusing, and because of their advertising.

The one I use for all my stuff is NameCheap because they have decent prices, and almost always have a good deal going (for example, free WHOIS Guard, free SSL, etc...).

Here's quite a large list of Domain Registrars.

I resell hosting myself, and so I manage all of my own hosting under that account. Within the next few years, I may switch over to a dedicated server - or I may even set up my own datacenter. I'm working on a business plan that I may or may not implement - that will target the non-profit organization, the church, and the community development organization. Stay tuned!

(I'm already running my business part-time right now, but may step it up a notch and go full time with it, and start some pretty big investments.)

I agree with you Peter. GoDaddy's ads are very demeaning to women and men. I used them in the past and they have pretty good customer support but I can't give them my business until they change their ways. Another problem with GoDaddy is their web site which is horribly complicated and slow. I have been using 1and1.com for domains and A2hosting.com for hosting for the past year with no problems.

We are also a domain registrar/hosting company and as such a direct competitor with Godaddy. It may seems strange I give them a 2 stars rating instead of 1. I guess I'm trying to be fair with them, instead of just bashing our competitor. Yes, they do give a lot of value for their services, at least on the surface. However, we have discovered many dark side of their practices too. We have scrutinized them for a long time and received many feedbacks from their former customers (now ours) so these are true facts.

I will not list all their questionable practices and sometime unethical tricks here (too much to mention). In fact, I had been their customer for several years too so I'm also speaking from personal experience with them. I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from using their service, but just want to caution you to read their fine prints very carefully (and there are lots of them). For example, they can lock your domain because of a spam report and demand large amount of payment before they will return the domain back to you.

Tom
Active-Domain LLC
http://www.active-domain.com

I used godaddy for a year, and I wasn't happy with the adds either, but my biggest beef was how they didn't want you using open source software, b/c they wanted you to buy *their* software and *their* services. The way they put it was "we don't support Wordpress, or drupal", even if it was their fault something didn't work.

I only use them to register my domains, although that may change. I tried hosting with them using VPS a couple times and to say that they weren't helpful is an understatement. It depends on what you're looking for in a host, really. If you're looking for shared hosting plans there are a few good companies out there - MediaTemple being one of the most obvious. I ran in to some trouble with them too, but it was again a VPS issue. If you're looking for more space and horsepower, I've been using Mosso for several months now, and although it's not for the one-off user, it's awesome. Find someone who is selling space on their system and you're sure to get a pretty good deal. Their support is awesome, the CP is awesome and I haven't had a single complaint, though many service tickets.

Hi All!!!!!!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!!!!!

I think my post to this tread is missing. Also, there were a few more post that I do not see.

Tim

I agree with all the bad reviews. I work at a church, and we had our lease on our url for our teen site. Godaddy placed a holder page there that linked to a lot of porn sites. I called them and asked for them to place some other form of ads on there while we contacted our old pastor who had registered it in his name. They said that they would not be able to do that until we paid them. I am very dissatisfied and disgusted at their policies.

I agree 100%. Dealing with them leaves me feeling rather slimy.

I find that Godaddy is cheap for domain names but has some major drawbacks. The Control
Panel is not really nice - cPanel is much better and has great backup features.

Also, a CMS site like Drupal with a lot of modules 48 or more in my instance, will not work well. Not enough PHP memory and they refuse to increase it.

Crucial Paradigm (recommended on Drupal.org) is who I use now and they are fantastic.

Godaddy has some good features and they do offer low prices. As far as I know, they are as reliable in service as anyone out there. My very first websites were hosted with Godaddy, and I can't complain about the service or the support, whenever a problem came up. Very professional in many ways.

I've moved all my hosting away from Godaddy, though, because they have increasingly turned to ridiculous ads and marketing, including trying to sell web services with sex. A number of my sites are specifically Christian in content, and all are family-friendly. It makes no sense to try and operate decent sites with a bad hosting supplier, especially when there are other options.

I do not use a "Christian" hosting service, and see no need to seek one out. I'm sorry to say that too many businesses that advertise as Christian-owned and operated have not been that great. But I always respect any business that is operated in a business-like fashion. Godaddy seems to have forgotten that professional services are best advertised with professional ads. If you offer excellence then use that standard of excellence as your selling point.

By the time you have made it this far down the list I don't think that there is anything that I could say (nor would I want to in this case)that would change your mind.

I have had two clients ask me to use their Go Daddy accounts. Fortunately the first was only to change the DNS servers and I could go away. In this case I learned that the username is actually an ID number (sign of the beast if I am being asked), and the client wasn't sure about the PW either, but we worked our way through it.

The latest experience is what has shifted it from a 2 or 3 star down to a single. The client had set some stuff up and was really insistent that it stay with GD and so we worked with it from there. They had a "Website Tonight" Account. With this account you are pretty much locked into their templates. If you work around with it enough you will find some ways that you can change the CSS. Don't do it in line, because some of it will go away, while some remains. So you are trying to do some fine tuning and you have to muscle it in as you figure out the idiosyncrasies about which inline calls get pushed to the magic CSS and which stay put.

Also the client had a Traffic Blazer account as well. Kind of nice in theory, but it doesn’t interrelate with the pages themselves X-(So you are trying to adjust the recommendations (which weren't all bad) and it doesn't auto update the material. I was working on making the solutions relevant, but then the pages would update, but when the Traffic Blazer looked at it I would get the same stupid warnings unless I waited for an hour or two. We finally got it tagged, but there was still one warning that the home page and index page (which it read as two separate entries) were "Duplicate Content" Really? DUH!! Unfortunately all the client sees is a warning and so we talked them off that ledge. But the best thing about Traffic Blazer when you put the keywords into the pages that you think link to the actual pages, you DON'T. Instead what it does is give you the code to put into your page (as if you actually had access to insert raw code into the page).

Finally you might be thinking, maybe I can just FTP the pages and then I will know what to do. Right? Sorry! Ain't gonna happen (At least I couldn't find the solution after 2 hours) It looks like it might be an option on the premium accounts, but not on the Website Tonight version.

So in closing, grab a hammer and beat yourself in the head if you want the pain, but don't go with GD. Especially when there are so many good hosts that work. IMO

Suffice it to say not a pleasant experience.

Kent