GoDaddy Will Wipe Your Site If You Miss A Payment
Ok, let me start with this: I’m a GoDaddy customer. Have been for years. And I signed up for another 10 years about a year ago. Why? Because it was cheap. And, in the beginning, it seemed fine. Customer service was fine, although the constant upselling was annoying. Still, that’s no worse than others.
Then, last year, I think I missed a payment by about 20 days. And here’s the kicker: they wiped my entire website with no possibility of recovery. Let me repeat, no possibility of recovery. Years of work, gone. Now, you think it would be easy and inexpensive to keep a copy. But no, they didn’t.
First, let me note, I had a problem with the site before (don’t remember the exact problem, but it wasn’t the same), and they were able to recover my site for a fee. So I was shocked, and of course, I’d rather pay a fee than lose years of work.
Did I have a backup? Yes, but it was on the site. So when the site was wiped, so was the backup. Thankfully, my website designer had some backup. And let me repeat, some – it was a fraction of the work I had done on the site. So I was able to rescue the site design and some posts, but very few.
All I can is, GoDaddy has earned my eternal anger and animus. It would have been cheap and easy to keep a copy. Did they care? No.
Update – April 9, 2020 – Bad Technical Support
So I was updating my site and I got a 503 error – not that I know what that means. It was persistent, so the next day (today) I called technical support. They went through a couple checks, checked and saw some other pages were working, and I sent him several error screenshots. After trying a few more things, he finally had me open up terminal and try pinging my site. This basically sends a signal to my site and traces the route of the signal. When you get the terminal report, three asterisks indicate a time out. Here’s the terminal report:
According to the technician, we can see that the signal is routed through roadrunner, which is also Spectrum, and this is indicated by the “rr.com” in line 4 and line 5. Then the signal times out before it reaches godaddy.com at line 11. Therefore, the technician proudly declared, this is Spectrum’s fault, and I had to call Spectrum. He even walked me through confirming this with another technician, and signed off. It took me two phone calls (the first GoDaddy person had to refer me to hosting) and about half an hour.
I called Spectrum, which in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown had a really long wait time to answer calls. Of course, the automated system told me there was no breakdown in my area and everything seemed to be working fine. I tried twice to get a live person and gave up.
Later that night, I was working on the website and saw that an instagram slider on my page wasn’t working. And it occurred to me, the 503 might be caused by this failed instagram slider. Because it wasn’t working, the response time was longer than permitted, and so an error was appearing. And sure enough, I fixed the slider, and my website started working again.
Before this, I had envisioned calling Spectrum and after a huge wait time, they’d probably tell me they couldn’t figure it out, because, how do you figure out where a signal is stopping). Or that there’s nothing wrong on their end (as the automated system was indicating) and I should contact GoDaddy.
Thinking about it, this should have been an obvious possibility. I can only imagine how many other people with a similar problem they’ve sent on a wild goose chase.
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