South Africans Should Avoid GoDaddy.com for this Simple Reason...

I have been using GoDaddy for a while and have had a couple of issues in the past. Sites going down and stopped working a coupe of times. Hours on the phone to try and resolve downtime. In some cases almost a week without my sites & email working. I have also had a lot of issues regarding email that stopped working for days on end.

So, firstly our South African based company relies 100% on our website and email to function. We are an online based lead company and when our websites is are of order, so is our income. GoDaddy does not care about this, trust me. Your livelihood means nothing to this American corporate giant.

For some reason without any changes to our websites, our resources recently kept spiking indicating we need to upgrade resources. Please keep in mind that we have had the same amount of traffic with the same websites for a couple of years. I decided to see what the upgrade was about and decided to click on "Upgrade to Business Hosting" link - There was no warning or terms and conditions stating that there might be possible downtime. I assumed extra resources will simply be assigned to my account. The next morning, I woke up and our company email was down. I checked and noticed two of our main money sites were also down.

I immediately phoned GoDaddy to ask what was going on. I was told that the migration had issues and it seems like only half of the content was migrated to the business hosting package. I explained to them that downtime ****s our business and we literally cannot afford to be off for even one day. The agent said it will be up in 24 hours. I phoned again 24 hours later and was told another 24 hours. I phoned again another 24 hours later and was told another 24 hours. This means our websites have been off for almost 3 full days already with no feedback or progress report from GoDaddy. I also explained to them that I have to travel for business the next day and will be away for a week. Due to this nightmare I might have to cancel my trip costing our company a lot of much needed income.

In short, if you are in South Africa and rely on your website for an income, steer clear from GoDaddy website hosting. They are quick to try and sell "value added" services and additional hosting resources but when things go wrong, they are nowhere to be found. This downtime so far has cost our company more income than we can afford and we don't even know when or if the issue will be resolved. At the end of the day, this Billion Dollar company steps on the people who helped them get to where they are.

I am extremely disappointed in GoDaddy's service and can't wait for my sites to come back up so I can move to a host that cares about the well being of their customers. Not seeing the importance of up time makes me sick. All this because I clicked on upgrade resources. If I had any warning that this could happen I would never have paid for a bigger hosting package.

My sites are still down as I type this complaint and not only is the company losing income, but also the 25 staff members who work purely on commission. GoDaddy is literally taking food from the tables of 25 undeserving families. They should be really proud of themselves for not caring. They obviously don't know what it's like to live in a third world country where a single days wages lost affects an entire family for weeks to come.

Well done GoDaddy, I hope this message reached a lot of potential customers in South Africa. If you read this, trust me keep your hosting local, you will regret this service.