Go Daddy comes through with great customer support

I’ve been hosting a number of Web sites (including this blog) on Go Daddy for the past few years and have never had a problem with their service (shared hosting).

Until now.

Lately, I’ve noticed that all my sites on my shared hosting account have been slowing down – to the point where it is taking anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds just to get server response and start pulling in the contents of a particular page. I let this go for a couple of weeks, figuring that it was a problem on my end or that they were in the process of an upgrade of sorts. However, after things continued to degrade, I began testing a number of my sites from different locations and soon found that this was not an issue with my Internet connection, but rather a Go Daddy server issue.

No problem – I’ll just fire off an email to their technical support team and they’ll be able to get to the bottom of this problem, right? Wrong! I received a prompt reply from one of their staff members stating that they tested a few of my hosted Web sites and that there was nothing wrong.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting Hosting Support.

I was unable to duplicate any slowness on your web site at the current time. In shared hosting environments, there can be times when the load spikes and causes a site to load slower than normal, but this is not something that can be entirely avoided using shared hosting. If you find that load times are unacceptable during peak times, you may want to considering using a virtual dedicated or dedicated server in order to host your web site. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Please contact us if you have any further issues.

Regards,

Daniel S.
Hosting Support

Well as soon as I got that email I tested again, and the results were the same as before – SSLLOOWW.

Then this morning things got worse – I attempted to bring up my blog but all I got was a server timeout error. This same error occurred when I tested the rest of my sites, so obviously something very strange was going on.

Another email to the Go Daddy technical support team and again, to their credit, they responded quickly – this time contacting me on my Twitter account:

GoDaddyGuy @badg0003 I’m researching your account now. Be on the lookout for an email from our support team later today.

That message was received early in the afternoon, and at the time I presently write this (6:00 PM EST), I still haven’t heard back or received any emails from Go Daddy, except for an invoice stating that my account has been renewed for two extra months at no cost. Hrmmm. What’s up with that?

Tuesday, September 1st – 8:00 AM EST

Last night I received an email from their technical support (GoDaddyGuy) saying that there was still not an ETA on my problem, but that he did not expect it to last longer than a day. In addition, he mentioned the fact that I had been given two extra months of service at no charge and that if this current issue I was having continued they would look at moving me to either a new server or a grid account.

Mike,

Thanks for communicating with me on Twitter. I thought it might be a little easier to continue via email…

I apologize for any inconvenience you’ve experienced recently. Please know that our server administrators are actively working to resolve the slowness you’ve encountered. Although I don’t have an ETA to share with you, I don’t expect this to last for more than a day. If you continue to have trouble beyond that, I’d be happy to work with you to migrate to a new server or to a grid account.

Also, as a courtesy to you, I have added two months of service to your hosting account. If there’s anything else I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Regards,

Alon
Twitter: GoDaddyGuy
GoDaddyGuy@GoDaddy.com
Phone: (480) 505-8800 ext. 4373

11:00 PM EST

I’m still waiting for a response from the Go Daddy technical support team after emailing them early this morning. I’ve sent another twitter message to @GoDaddyGuy The status of my Web sites remains the same. I’ve now been offline for 24 hours.

1:00 PM EST

Got a phone call from Alon (@GoDaddyGuy) who assured me they were handling the situation and then gave me a few options, one of which included transferring my sites over to Grid Hosting account. Since there was only one critical site that needed to be launched, he offered to do this for me, and as long as I took care of updating the domain’s A record, everything would be fairly seamless. I have to say I was pretty impressed with the level of service and support – he is even throwing in an extra three months of free service, so that was appreciated. Before he hung up he mentioned that he would be in contact with me (via Twitter) as they progressed through the server transfer of my site.

I’ve become used to crappy technical support, thanks to Rogers, but the Go Daddy team, especially Alon, really came through and made a difference.

2:30 PM EST

Well all’s well, it ends well. Within an hour the main Web site that I transferred over to Grid Hosting was up and running as normal. Now I have to decide whether or not I want to transfer all the rest of my sites over, or just leave them as is and hope the Go Daddy technicians can fix the server issues.