For the past several days I’ve been vigorously fighting with my website host Godaddy.com to honor their quotes & coupons. I was trying to order domain renewal @ $10.87 (with ICANN fee) and economy hosting renewal @ $47.88 for a total of $58.75 and using the coupon “nauoff” which takes off $10 the final price is $48.75. I know this for a fact as I saw the price in the shopping cart.
Unfortunately I when I returned later to complete the order a accidentally ordered a “new” hosting account, which was actually cheaper $47.07. When the order was complete I emailed godaddy to correct it but got no response so I cancelled the order online. I tried reordering but godaddy only refunded the hosting (leaving a $2.17 on my credit card for the domain registration) as a result I was unable to use the coupon. The hosting renewal is already discounted and the coupon will only work if there is a regularly priced item during checkout. So now there was a $2.17 domain charge and the original $47.88 hosting renewal charge for a total of $50.05 ($1.30 more than what I was first quoted).
Ok that’s understandable, I just need to get a hold of an actually person and explain that I in fact order both domain and hosting renewal and they could manually enter the coupon and credit the $1.30.
WRONG!
Everyone I contacted via email, as godaddy has no toll-free phone number, completely ignored my detailed explanation, instead they patronized me by telling me that I had received my $2.17 domain promotion. Not only was this not the issue, it doesn’t take a genius to realize $10 off a regularly priced $10.87 domain, which comes to 87 cents, is better than a $2.17 domain.
I told them to move this up to a supervisor and again got no response. After searching non-godaddy sites I finally found the email [email protected]. Surely the President of Godaddy would honor their quotes and credit $1.30 to a longtime customer (going on 3 years).
WRONG!
I got yet another condescending email explaining my “confusion.” Mandy O’Connor wrote “We apologize for any confusion you may have had regarding the renewal pricing. Had you renewed the domain and the hosting appropriately, without a discount, you would have paid $70.57. You indicated that you utilized a $10 discount and this would have brought the total down to $60.57”
BULL!
I know that $47.88 is the correct hosting renewal price as it’s listed on both the receipt godaddy sent me and my credit card, and with the regularly priced domain 10.87 (listed right on their site) the total comes to $58.75 not $70.57. In fact there’s no possible combination that adds up to $70.57. Even a new hosting account only costs $56.88 and if you add a full priced domain for $10.87, you get $67.75 not $70.57. In other words, not even management knows their own prices!
But all this is beside the point. We’re talking about $1.30! I could get a refund out of McDonald’s faster than this. Why would a multi-million dollar company alienate a customer to argue over $1.30 out of $50.05.
Who’s your daddy?
As it turns out that Godaddy.com’s bait and switch fraud was the best thing to happen to this site! After a lot of searching I found Hostgator.com to be a much better deal. They give you unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited email, cpanel, and TOLL-FREE SUPPORT! All that for about the same as godaddy’s lowest plan, if you sign up for 3 years. Unfortunately these are tight times so I was hesitant to to shell out $178.20 up front. But there’s a Hostgator Black Friday Sale today for 75% OFF!!! That’s 3 years of superior service for just $44.55, naturally I jumped on the deal. So as soon as I transfer everything over to Hostgator, L7world.com will be officially emancipated from godaddy!
If you have also been grounded by goddady or any other hosting service, click the link on the right and enter coupon code “75off” for 75%. If you don’t make it in time don’t wait until next Black Friday to get the hosting you deserve, they’ve always got great coupons like “AUTUMN” for 20% off or “HOUSTON” for $25 off.
UPDATE:
Good news! The transfer is now complete. The best part is Hostgator did it for me for FREE and it took less than 2 hours! It takes godaddy 8 hours just to reply to an email, let alone do anything.
I also like that there’s a quick tutorial when you first login that’ll help you get started. Godaddy ain’t got that! Although honestly I’ll probably never use 1/2 of this stuff.
There was one hiccup though. As some visitors may have noticed, the homepage was up and running but none of the internal links worked. Just blank pages! (arrrghhh!) I contacted hostgator but luckily I was able figured it out myself. I just had to rebuild the sitemap via the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress (doh!)
Dear Hostgator,
Could you please provide me a point of contact with your company concerning consideration in exchange for a contract to do business with your company. I look forward to your response.
John Zarlino – Internet Visionary
I seriously doubt Hostgator’s going to contact you through the comments on this post.
I suggest you try emailing [email protected] or calling them directly, 1-866-96-GATOR (42867). If you still can’t get an answer try Brent’s email.
godaddy has its own control panel, which i am not very familiar to. i am familiar with whm/cpanel. but hostgator charges 10 dollars extra for it.
Nope, cpanel is included free on ALL Hostgator plans!
Hi Guys,
I’m Brent with HostGator and first off thank you Mark for your honesty.
My goal is to build Hostgator through honesty. If we ever stop doing it the honest way I hope we are torn down just as fast as we’ve been built.
If I ever stop responding to [email protected] personally we have lost what we stand for and don’t deserve your business.
Godaddy is at least 10x our size so it’s definitely easier said then done responding to customers.
However I’m sure I could handle at least 20x the responses I currently receive with further delegation of other tasks.
The truth is we have 275 employees and with that we mess up a lot. I messup a lot!
Anyone reading this please give me a chance to make things right with Hostgator before writing us off as a bad company.
You can’t blame Mark for attempting to take it to the top and getting ignored. I only wish we were giving the opportunity as Mark gave. What more can you ask for seriously?
I’m writing this as my Girlfriend is driving 80mph+ down the highway on my aircard. Usually I wouldn’t respond to blogs posts like this since most are affiliate spam. Thanks Mark for what to me seems to be the truth. If we ever do you wrong I hope you tear us down as fast as you’ve built us up.
If there is anything I can ever do for anyone please email me at [email protected]
-brent
12 months of their economy hosting is $53.64 which is advirtised on their website. That reflects a 5% discount for renewing for a year. Without the 5% discount it would be $59.88. If you add in the domain renewal you have either $64.51 or $70.75. You can not take the 5% discount if you renew for a year PLUS use the $10.00 coupon. Like O’Connor told you, if you went with the $70.75 then you could of used the $10.00 coupon. Trying every calculation imaginable for their economy hosting plan, I could not come up with a figure of $47.88 for a 1 year renewal. Their prices are plain as day on their site, and I recieve multiple coupons through email and regular mail from them, and when used correctly and within the guidelines, they all work perfectly. For about 5 years now I have never experienced any bait and switch schemes, in fact, I have experience the opposite when dealing with a salesperson over the phone with them actually increasing a discount for me because of my past business with them. Hostgator is a good company and does a nice job, but when you try and build up one by tearing down the other, the intent comes through loud and clear, and to be honest with you, I don’t think Brent Oxley is looking to build up his compnay that way.
You don’t have to “come up” with $47.88 it’s the automatic renewal price. It says so right on the godaddy receipt! (below)
First of all, congratulations Mark on your move. You are one of many that have moved away from GoDaddy and as a former customer of GoDaddy myself, I can agree that GoDaddy isn’t all that great… Unless of course you’re into dumb brunettes with big boobs and great advertising campaigns.
What I sorta laughed about was the comment quoted below:
“Hostgator is a good company and does a nice job, but when you try and build up one by tearing down the other, the intent comes through loud and clear, and to be honest with you, I don’t think Brent Oxley is looking to build up his compnay that way.”
In response: if this was Brent Oxley’s blog, then I would see the validity in your comment but it’s not. Brent can build up his company as he sees fit and Mark has every right to blog about his bad experiences with GoDaddy. To my knowledge Mark isn’t working for Brent and Brent isn’t building his business through Mark’s blog so what difference does it make?
For professionals, GoDaddy flat out sucks! It’s cluttered, it has too much focus on bells and whistles, (and boobs) and not enough on functionality and clients. GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar because they are tailored to meet the needs of newbies coming into the domains or getting a website. GoDaddy is usually the first place of business for domains and hosting and I’m sure a lot of you know how much of a headache it is to move hosting or transfer domains away or even into GoDaddy.
I’ve been a client of HostGator for 4 years. Worry not that your money and your hosting is going into the right place.
I signed up for GoDaddy hosting for a Drupal site. After spending 3 hours trying to copy over a Drupal site, I looked for another hosting service. I found Hostgator. I had my Drupal site installed and running in an hour. GoDaddy is good for domains, but I don’t like their interface for hosting sites.
I’m glad to hear that your sites got transferred over to HostGator without any trouble and that you’re enjoying your hosting with us. Thanks for your business. :)