I was a GoDaddy customer for 15+ years. Today, I moved my last site away from their platform.
Way back when, GoDaddy was a great place to register domain names inexpensively. I had several with them. Later I would also use their shared web hosting for myself and various clients.
GoDaddy always had a “bro”-ish vibe, but then again this was the internet of the 2000’s and, let’s be honest, the vast majority of folks building websites back then were probably sweaty guys.
Anybody remember the Danica Patrick commercials?
Things for me were fine with GoDaddy until mid-2021, when one of the sites I hosted there got hacked. It was a site for a local non-profit organization. It was therefore super embarrassing for them when their site suddenly started promoting Viagra and Cialis. As the person who built their website, and the only person (outside of GoDaddy) who had access, I was highly motivated to find out how this could have happened.
Long story short, there were no vulnerabilities on my side. My computer was clean; the website had no vulnerable software; my passwords were all unique and cryptographically secure (I am a programmer, after all). Somehow, an attacker was able to change the FTP password and access the site remotely, without any involvement from my side.
I never got a definitive answer, but I wondered if it may have been related to the October 2019 GoDaddy Breach. Approximately 28,000 SSH usernames and passwords were compromised, and supposedly changed after GoDaddy discovered it the following April. However that means six months in between where who knows what else may have been compromised. Who knows if GoDaddy correctly identified all the compromised accounts?
Well anyway I cleaned up the site myself (a big chunk of time I’ll never get back) and moved on.
However over the last few years, post-COVID I guess, there has been another change happening at GoDaddy. This is just my opinion as an observer, but — they’ve been getting much more greedy and aggressive than ever before.
GoDaddy’s prices have been steadily climbing. For domains, .com renewals have reached $22/year, which is pretty steep, especially when you own a lot of domains. But that’s not the worst of it. Their basic shared hosting plan, which used to be about $10/month, then became $13.99/month, has now become $16.99/month. That’s a 70% increase over the last 5 years! And is if that weren’t enough, now they are quietly signing me up for paid extras, without my knowledge or consent!
Last year they tacked on this thing called “PHP Extended Support Level 1” for an extra $2.99/month. I didn’t ask for it, I don’t want it. They just charge me anyway cuz… they can?
By the time that email arrived, I was down to just one client website still being hosted at GoDaddy. It was an old, flat-HTML-files website (not even using PHP!), which I intended to move elsewhere, but for various reasons — mostly being busy with life, and that particular website being a low priority — I didn’t get around to it. Before you know it — BOOM — a whole year has gone by and I get another renewal notice:
Finally sufficiently motivated, I go to login to my GoDaddy account — which I haven’t logged into at all for at least 2 years — and start transferring out the last couple domains and the one website.
Now, as if I didn’t have enough reason to leave GoDaddy already, in the process of trying to move the last things out, they start signing me up for more shit I don’t want! I *LITERALLY* only clicked on one of the domains in my account in order to get to the settings to unlock it and grab the transfer code, and from that *one click* it started signing me up for something called “GoDaddy Airo”! (Which I guess is their AI website builder, or something like that.) Without any input from me it’s trying to create a website and a logo and whatever fucking else, and adds 2-3 new “products” to my GoDaddy account (“free trials” I guess, which I’m sure would start charging me next year if I don’t cancel them).
How is it okay to sign me up for shit I don’t want, and didn’t ask for? And after that make me jump through much more complicated steps to “cancel” the things I never asked for in the first place? This is shady shit, GoDaddy. It’s not okay.
So anyway I got the rest of my shit moved, and cancelled all the things I could cancel. I then removed my credit card from the payment methods on file. I hope they actually removed my card and aren’t just lying to me! Now I’m officially “done” with GoDaddy, and I won’t miss them one bit. (I hope I’m done with them, that is… I’ll have to watch my card statements for the next year or so and file a dispute if any more GoDaddy charges come along.)
GoDaddy – what a horrible, scammy company.