Are you still using GoDaddy?

Earlier this week, we saw a huge melt down of domain registrar GoDaddy. If you are using GoDaddy for hosting, email or DNS services, basically everything stopped working.

Now it’s no secret that I’m not a fan of GoDaddy. In several past podcasts, I’ve talked about my dislike, especially 011 – Why I Can’t Stand Using GoDaddy and I even tweeted this on Monday:

GoDaddy Outage Takes Down Millions Of Sites http://t.co/C9TKtKbV //Glad I strongly dislike their service and don't use them for anything 🙂

— Dustin Hartzler (@DustinHartzler) September 10, 2012

I guess I should back up a second and tell you what happened.

Basically, any service that was being hosted at GoDaddy, vanished. A hacker named Anonymousown3r tweeted out that he took down the giant company. Whether this is true or not, remains to be seen, but the fact is, GoDaddy went down hard.

I had a different issue to talk to them about on Monday and even their hold message was all messed up.

Monday’s meltdown should be the last straw if you are still using them (in my opinion). They are still okay for domain registration, as that’s what they are good with, but anything else, you should stay far away.

I’m a fan of smaller companies because:
– I normally get better customer service
– Small companies are not usually prone to huge global attacks
– You normally get more for your money

In case you are interested in leaving GoDaddy, here are my personal recommendations.

Domain Registration

My personal favorite place to register domains is hover.com. Not only is the interface extremely clean and simplistic, but there are no crazy upsells. You purchase exactly what you want.

Now, some people may claim that at $15 their domains are more expensive; however, when you really look at it, you are actually saving money because Hover’s services includes WHOIS privacy, which means people cannot see your private account information. This is an upsell for GoDaddy Customers.

Plus, once you reach someone during business hours, you will never be put on hold. And usually the problem is resolved in less than 5 minutes (well, that’s been my experience)!

Email Hosting

I have people who I work with that couldn’t get to their email on Monday.

Wow, think about that.

If you are a small business and you rely on email communication to run your business, this puts a damper on your day. You can’t respond to message, you can complete tasks that were email, etc. Yeah, that’s bad news.

I recommend all of my clients to use Google Apps for email. I personally use their service and completely love it.

The only time in the 2.5 years I’ve had my Google Apps account I can remember not having access to my email is when I didn’t have an internet connection.

Seriously, I can’t remember a time my mail went down.

Plus with Google Apps, you get Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sites and all the other features of Google. With the Apps account, you can also manage internal company communications using these platforms. You can even upload your own company image and remove the Gmail branding.

If you need 10 email accounts or less, it’s completely free. If you need more, it’s simply $5 per month, per user. That’s about double GoDaddy’s price, but you get so many more resources, I can’t recommend them enough!

Website Hosting

Of the several reasons that I don’t like GoDaddy, the deal breaker is that they have no live chat. You have to get on the phone and wait to talk to someone.

That doesn’t work for me. I like to be able to send someone via live chat my error codes, screenshots etc.

The company that I highly recommend is GreenGeeks.com. They are a smaller company but they have incredible customer service.

When starting a live chat, you are talking to a live person within a minute.

Also, GreenGeeks has very little upselling and you can get a great deal on hosting packages. In fact, if you sign up with the link above and use the coupon code “TODAYOFFER” you will save an additional $30.

WordPress can be installed instantly on your server with their one-click installation scripts and it’s available for you to start editing immediately. Unlike GoDaddy, where you have to submit a request and it will be installed sometime in the next 24 hours.

It’s not Hard

I know that some people continue to pay GoDaddy and are frustrated with their services, but think it will be too difficult to transfer to a new provider.

It’s not difficult at all. Hover and GreenGeeks will help you every step of the way and there are great resources online to setup and configure your Google Apps account.

What’s it worth to you to be confident that you will receive every email or your shopping cart will always be online?