I am in the process, as I write this, of sorting out a mess created by GoDaddy hosting.

I took over a customer's account from another webmaster. In order to give us control over the domain name it had to be transferred from the former webmaster's account into a new account set up just for the customer. We were planning on setting up new hosting for the site, also on GoDaddy since the site was already set up for it, but what a nightmare it's been! 

We transferred the domain over into the customer's account this past week, the plan was to move only the domain name for now, set up the new hosting account and get everything uploaded into place and then change the nameservers to match the new location. (For those of you who do not know what nameservers are, these are the equivalent of "addresses" for domains--they tell all servers on the internet just where a website is located.) This would give us setup time to make sure the website was set up properly in its new location before changing the actual "address". This is how it's normally done, so that when the nameservers (aka address) are changed, the move is transparent to any but those who are aware that a change is taking place.

That's with other hosting companies. But not GoDaddy.

It turns out that when the domain changed accounts, and because the domain was hosted on GoDaddy servers, Godaddy's system changed the DNS and wiped out the information that sent the user to the site that was still in place. A call to support only provided the information that this was the way they did things. What? Changing an account puts the domain out of service? That makes no sense whatsoever. On no other system I have worked with have I ever seen anything like this occur. It effectively took down the customer's site and put them out of commission.

Okay, so there's nothing the support person can do, I just have to set up the new hosting. But can I do that? NO! Not on your life. GoDaddy's system insists that you assign a domain name for the new hosting, and when I inserted the domain name in question it tells me that it's already hosted elsewhere (but of course we can't GET to it or SEE it where it's hosted because the nameservers have been screwed up by GoDaddy) and can't be set up. So now I have to try and reach the old webmaster in order to get them to cancel the old hosting, which will then enable me to set up the new hosting. Thankfully I reached them right away, they canceled it, and a few minutes later I was finally able to set up the new hosting.

But this is not the end of the story. Oh, no! Because on GoDaddy's system, we're told the new hosting is not usable for 24-48 hours. I can't set up email, I can't do a single thing other than wait it out. I have never had THIS problem on any other system, either. In the meantime my poor customer is without a site, without her email, and there is absolutely nothing she or I can do other than wait.

During the process of all this changeover I also came to realize more fully (I'd known it before, but with GoDaddy it's getting much worse), that unless you are just wanting a place online to park some images for eBay or some other use, you will actually end up paying more to get what's needed because they have you paying for every little thing that on other hosting systems is generally included as part of the normal hosting setup. An item may include a small, one-time charge, but it's one time, not monthly. A good example of this is a dedicated IP address--GoDaddy charges $2.99/month for this, while I charge a few dollars once. This is true of a lot of other hosting as well--you may pay a little more per month, but when you add in all the things on GODaddy's hosting that these hosts offer as part of the deal, you end up paying a lot more than you would have had you used the other hosting company.

The worst of it is, the GoDaddy account system is so confusing, it is not easy to find the pieces of your account--you have to dig through pages of advertising that pushes all their products at you again and again just to get to the various control panels for email, hosting, and domain registration. It's a mess of s system if you ask me.

This experience brought me to consider.....what constitutes good hosting?