Why are we no Longer Recommending Godaddy for Hosting or Email Services? 
THE QUICK ANSWER
Since mid-2024, I saw a decline in their services and support:
- NO MORE US BASED CUSTOMER SERVICE: They have removed and dispersed their United States Customer Support Team, all customer service reports, technical support and billing are now located in the Philippines.
- POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE SUPPORT: The average wait time for phone support with their customer support is 45-60 minutes, so they now recommend all support inquires be addressed through the chat. The average chat discusses from AI bot to Level 1 to 2 to 3 support is 25-40 minutes to get even the simplest of tasks completed. The representatives on Level t to 3 are often rude, unable to answer your questions and put you on long, repeated holds.
- PRICING INCREASE: Godaddy has recently removed all firewall services from all their WP Managed Hosting Plans, without notification or warning, even in you have already paid for it with the inclusion of a firewall. So instead of blatantly increasing the cost of the hosting plans, they have removed needed services that you now have to pay for ala carte. The firewall service that was previously included in your Managed WordPress Hosting is equivalent to their Advanced Website Security plan which is now an $20 per month.
MY HISTORY WITH GODADDY
Before I break the news about Startup Production’s breakup story, let me start at the beginning. I have been a loyal customer of Godaddy for over 25 years, beginning with my own company’s use of their web hosting, email and domain registration services. As a website designer and developer, I have recommended (but not required) clients to host their websites with Godaddy. And I have facilitated my client’s account setup, administration and support via Godaddy’s dashboard and phone support. I would estimate that in the last 20+ years, I’ve managed more than 250 client accounts within the Godaddy environment.
Over those years, I have made 100’s of calls to Godaddy support, for example when sites go down, SSL or Firewall cause issues, setup goes awry or the client requests changes to their products. And I have to say over the past twenty years of calling the support team, who were based out of Arizona in the US, they have been amazing!! The many times I’ve called and spoken to their support team in the United States, they’ve been friendly, knowledgeable, consistent and always follow up if they could not solve the issue on the first call. So, for all those years of support I want to thank … Jon, James, Ed, Danilo, Dave, RXG and more.
In 2020, I served on their Godaddy Pro Customer Advisory Board, worked with Tara Ellington and her team, as they listened to a group of developers and designers on how to make our job easier and clients happier. That was also an awesome 8-week experience, and I got a ton of Godaddy branded gifts after. Not that the price is the determining factor but, until now, their prices have been among the lowest in the industry and very reasonable.
I’m not sure what precipitated the major changes I’ve seen over the last 4-5 months, but it’s given me and my clients enough concern and dismay, that I have had to make the heartbreaking decision to let go and make a change as a previously loyal customer of Godaddy’s. After spending hours on the phone, site after site having issues, and the frustration and mental torture of dealing with their exclusively overseas support team, I finally had to make the decision to break up and make major changes.
As questions arise with any breakup, I’ve been asking myself … How did we get here? What went wrong? Why and when did things start to fall apart? And how do I begin to move on post-breakup? So, here’s my story, of the issues I have been experiencing to motivate such a change after all these years.
FIRST REASON: Increase of Cost
So instead of blatantly increasing the cost of the hosting plans, they have removed needed services that you now have to pay for ala carte. This is a sneak way to basically double the price of your hosting costs. How did they do this?
Godaddy has recently removed all firewall services from all their WP Managed Hosting Plans, without notification or warning. So even if you have already paid for one of their hosting plans for a year or more with the inclusion of a firewall at your purchase, they have now REMOVED that service from your current plan. Without notification or warning, the previously included firewall with your hosting plan has now been removed and you will now need to purchase it separately – that is in addition to your hosting costs. Why do you need a firewall?
The firewall service that was previously included in your Managed WordPress Hosting is equivalent to their Advanced Website Security plan which is now an $20 per month. The final cost now will be:
- $16.99 at the baseline Deluxe plan for Managed WP hosting
- Add $20 for a firewall ala carte
- Your total now comes to $36.99 for Deluxe, more if you want to purchase Ultimate plan.
The good news is that CSSI’s Business Hosting Plan is now the same price or a bit cheaper with faster load times, faster servers, improved security and much better customer service.
SECOND REASON: Loss of Quality Support
The absolute decline and deterioration of their technical support process is the primary reason I can no longer work with Godaddy in the future. After several customers have had issues (which I’ll describe next), I have spent HOURS with Godaddy’s new support system struggling for an excessive amount of time to resolve the simplest issues. They are now highly discouraging phone support of any kind, with wait times of 45-60 minutes to get a real person on the phone, so they will keep pushing you to chat instead.
Why? Because the chat starts out with an AI automated support that makes you rotate through a long list of asinine questions to delay, frustrate, repeat and hopefully discourage you from staying on the line. The phone support is also rather unreliable, because if you do finally wait for someone to get on the line, if they have to transfer you, there’s a high likelihood the call will drop, and you will have to start over. They are doing all they can to ensure you give up and give out … and move on. Which is what I’m doing.
So, for you to better understand where my frustration lies … Here’s the pattern of a typical conversation of delay, frustrate, repeat and discourage:
- AI Chatbot (approximately 5-10 minutes to get to next level): If contacting through chat, which is their recommended option, you start out with an AI automated system that asks you for login credentials, domain name, a detailed description of the issue, what department you think will best handle this, what you are seeing when you go to your URL … and each of these are usually multiple choice questions. You can try to bypass it by confusing the AI bot and putting in nonsense answers and finally, the AI bot will redirect you to Level 1 support. (I believe the AI Chatbot’s full purpose is to delay you long enough to keep you typing and occupied until they can find a Level 1 support tech to get on the chat.)
- Level 1 support (approximately 10-15 minutes to get to next level): Again, you will be asked about your account credentials, domain name, and now that you are speaking to a real person, you will be asked to complete a two-factor (which is really three factors) authentication. The call in pin is no longer sufficient. After authenticated, Level 1 support will again require a full description of the issue, and then you will wait anywhere from 10-15 minutes as they ‘process’ or ‘type’ a response, followed by several more questions which are just redundancies of what has already been asked in different ways … remember delay, frustrate, repeat and discourage you to give up. If you are persistent and patient and keep answering all their questions, they will finally send you up the chain …
- Level 2 support (approximately 15-20 minutes to get to next level): Again, they will ask for a detailed description of your issue, what you have tried, if you’ve read the support manuals, and if you have already troubleshooted the most obvious solutions. The types of questions they ask are a red flag signal to a website developer that Level 2 support has no idea how to resolve your issue, much less understand it. Again, your patience is required to AGAIN answer all of these redundant questions. After which Level 2 will put you on hold for 10-15 minutes as they research your issue. (Please NOTE: you must keep typing in the chat even if they’ve told you to wait because after 3 minutes, the chat goes inactive, you will be disconnected and you will have to start over.) And if you wait and continue to chat … you will be rewarded to reach Level 3 support!
- Level 3 support (where the resolution happens): Level 3 support is an actual trained support member, and they can tell you at least why it’s not working. You will have to explain the issue once again, but this time they are not asking questions that signal their inexperience or their lack of basic IT knowledge. Whether it was a site down, a firewall issue, a DNS issue, it was usually resolved at this stage. If in some cases, even Level 3 could not figure it out, then the issue was sent up the chain to the advanced team (customers never speak to Level 4 – they are untouchable and unreachable). If Level 4 support is required, that means they will email you when the issue is understood and resolved. Bye-bye and wait, you may have to wait 24-48 hours for a response.
- PLEASE NOTE: If you are trying to cancel a product, receive a refund for a product cancelled within 30 days, or point your domain name away from Godaddy’s hosting, they are going to take their tactics of “of delay, frustrate, repeat and discourage” to a WHOLE other level, as they have been trained to make it very difficult for a customer to cause a reduction in their revenue by cancelling products. And if you do get that far, with great patience and determination, you will have to pass through two, three, and four levels of authentication. Why? They claim it’s because they want to ensure your product is not accidentally being cancelled but if they can discourage you to put it off or forget it all together, they’ve won. And God help you if you have an old email or old contact information on your account when starting this authentication process, so make sure your email, phone, and address is correct before you begin talking to them. Also, their support team will by default issue your money back to store credit. So, tell them from the outset, you want a refund to your credit/debit card.
I have been using a stopwatch for each recent conversation with Godaddy support since the end of November 2024 to measure resolution times, and here are some of the issues I have to report:
- ISSUE: A WordPress website was moving at a snail’s pace on the backend management. TIME: 2 hours and 32 minutes to realize it was on their end and nothing could be done. (More about this in next section.)
- ISSUE: A client wanted to delete an email plan hosting and domain name that was no longer being used. The domain name was connected to an old, unused email and it took several hoops, but we got access to cancel and get a refund. TIME: 1 hour and 10 minutes.
- ISSUE: A client was moving to our NEW hosting partner, so we needed to be able to change the A record on their DNS settings, but we got a message each time we tried that Godaddy was preventing the A record change. The hosting and firewall associated with the domain had to be fully disconnected and cancelled from the domain name before this change can happen. It was resolved and the A record was finally changed. TIME: 1 hour and 12 minutes.
- ISSUE: Another client moved over to the NEW hosting partner so needed to cancel their Managed WordPress hosting product and be fully refunded for the full amount that was charged 10 days prior. (After 30 days, no refunds are issued.) TIME: 16 minutes.
I will keep adding running tallies here as I continue to move my existing clients over or they experience issues of slow speeds, downtime and other issues, which brings me to the second reason.
THIRD REASON: Loss of Hosting Uptime, Hosting Speed and Admin Side Errors
Again, after over 20 years of 99% uptime, fast speeds and no issues on the WordPress admin-side management, the contrast of the last 4-5 months has been unsettling and just plain sad. So many of my clients have called with issues of disconnected SSL, down sites, firewall issues, and much slower load times.
And I have consistently seen much slower processing times when developing the site and making changes on the backend of WordPress. As a developer, my time is money for my clients so the longer it takes for me to create, manage, edit and revise their site design and content on the backend, the more time they are being billed.
In one example, I had to repeat four steps of revisions on several pages for a client, and each time it was crashing as I tried to make the page with a “Page Unresponsive” to which I would hit “Wait” to wait for the page to resolve the processing wait time.
In some cases, I would just get the “Aw Snap” error from the browser, meaning the page fully crashed and you have to reload and start over. In that particular conversation, the Level 3 Tech support told me I need to (1) update the version of my browser, which I did; (2) I had to refresh my cache, which I did; (3) I needed to try it in an incognito window of the browser, which I did; (4) I needed to try it in another browser, which I did; and when none of those worked, he told me – I did not have enough memory on my PC, so it was client-side issue and not a Godaddy issue.
Then I demonstrated to the Level 3 support that when I replicated the exact same four steps on another site using all the same theme, plugins and variables, with the only difference being that the other site was NOT on Godaddy hosting, those four steps worked seamlessly and completed in seconds, without any “Page Unresponsive” or “Aw Snap” errors. Finally, the Level 3 Support was forced to admit it was not my issue but a server-side issue. (And that conversation was over two hours in length to get to that determination.)
Announcing a NEW Partnership for Hosting with CSSI, Inc.
So after research, product comparison, and previous experience with other hosting, I decided support, security, reliability and speed were the most important factors moving forward, while also find a reasonable price that is affordable to most small businesses. The days of paying $10 and under per month are long gone, even for Godaddy’s standards. After several long meetings and phone discussions, I have decided to partner with a long-time colleague and local business, Computer Services & Solutions, Inc. (CSSI). I’ve known the owner, Daniel Diachin, for many years as we both served as facilitators with Commerce Lexington’s BOAB groups.
His professional demeanor, friendly personality, his laser focus on security and compliance, as well as his willingness to develop a hosting product that fit mine and my clients’ needs were all reasons I chose to partner with his company CSSI.
About CSSI
CSSI, Inc is a complete IT service provider outsourcing tech support to small to medium-sized businesses. Located in Lexington KY, they have been serving clients all over the US since 1994. Their team of twelve technicians (10 of which are located in KY) are educated, skilled and possess on average a tenure of 5+ years. Their team provides the following services:
- Cloud Services
- Email Services
- Cybersecurity
- Phone Systems
- Compliance Facilitation
- Web Hosting Services
- And a Wide Range of Helpdesk Services
Why I Chose CSSI to Partner with Hosting Services
- CSSI is focused on security with Firewall Deployment via network firewalls and web application firewalls (WAFs) to monitor and filter traffic, with Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDPS) to detect and block malicious activities or policy violations; and Data Encryption for both at rest (stored data) and in transit (data being transferred) using secure protocols like HTTPS, SSL/TLS, and AES. Other tools implemented for security are multi-factor authentication, regular operating system/software patch updates and hardware updates; vulnerability scanning and penetration testing.
- CSSI is focused on speed with high performing hardware including Solid-State Drives (SSDs), sufficient RAM to support fast data processing, and powerful processors with high-speed, multi-core CPUs to handle multiple requests simultaneously.
- CSSI is focused on regulatory compliance including standards like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2.
- CSSI is focused on staying current with industry standards. They are deeply interested in investing time in training to expand their knowledge base, and investing financially for the latest software and hardware to ensure their team are staying on top of industry standards, tools and protocols.
- CSSI is focused on integrating our product and service offerings to ensure seamless collaboration across all processes, including cybersecurity, networking, PC support and updates, cloud services, web hosting, and email solutions. CSSI is all the specialists you need so that you don’t have to worry about technology to operate your business.
- CSSI is focused on customer service. They do not outsource tech support or billing support to any third-party call center, with their technicians located in Kentucky and the US. When you call, you are speaking to a CSSI employee so you will get knowledgeable and helpful responses to your questions and requests. Their team is focused on improving the customer experience with a friendly and professional demeanor, explanations that are not overly technical or confusing, and communicating effectively the what, why and how’s of their particular issue and the resolution.
Next Steps for My Existing Clients
Please contact me with ANY questions about any of the above reasons I’m no longer recommending Godaddy as a hosting and email service provider. Please contact me if you are looking to make a change to faster, more reliable, and more secure hosting. And also please contact me if you’d like to know when you are up for renewal for your Godaddy products so we can sign up, migrate and cancel your services before the renewal date (I’d recommend, you reach out 3-4 weeks before your renewal date so we have sufficient time to migrate and cancel, rather than fight to get a refund.)
If you’d like to move to CSSI hosting and/or email services: Here are the steps to get started:
- 1. Review the hosting packages and/or the email service plans on the Hosting Plan page (see button below); and review what is included for each package.
- 2. Fill out the form on that same page to select which items you are interested in.
- 3. After the form is received, the CSSI staff will provide you with an invoice and contract via email.
- 4. After the contract is signed and submitted, you can pay via ACH payments or call them with a credit/debit card. (CSSI requires annual payments. And there is an additional $20 setup fee if using a credit/debit card charged by CSSI).
- 5. Once the hosting is set up, contact Startup Production to begin migration of your existing website or for new clients, we can then begin development of your new website.
If you’d like to stay with Godaddy for now or wait for your renewal period: If you decide to remain with Godaddy, that is your choice but please note that if you do experience issues, delays or downtime, and you request Startup Production to handle the matter for you via Godaddy support, you will be billed for the time (as always). You do not have to wait for your product to expire to move to the new hosting company, but that is a financial decision and one that you alone will need to make. Just contact us with any questions, concerns or further recommendations.
