Leave Daddy

I am mystified why so many of my clients come to me having already bought web site hosting and domain name registration services from Go Daddy.

source: Go Daddy

You know Go Daddy.  They’re the company who advertises web services on the Super Bowl using large-breasted, pretty young women.  The commercials are cheesy bordering on the sleazy, and they seem to target hormone-crazed geeky teenage men of whatever age.  They are wildly successful.

The photo at right shows Go Daddy’s everyday sex-selling technique.  The image is from Go Daddy’s home page as configured this morning.  The picture shows that the company has even registered the term “Go Daddy Girl”.  Classy, eh?

Yet most of the clients who arrive on my doorstep having already purchased Go Daddy accounts are professional, liberated women — often attorneys. Others are female accountants and businesswomen who command respect.

I’m stumped. Do these women warriors secretly want a Daddy to take care of them? (They don’t seem to need big, strong male caretakers when I meet them, but who knows.)  Do the women think that using Go Daddy will make them look like the women in the ads? Maybe the commercials are so  effective that the women don’t know that there are better alternatives out there?  Or, are the rates for services so appealing that the wise women shoppers cannot resist.

Resistance is NOT Futile

There are two reasons to not select Go Daddy for any Internet services: professional and moral.

Why Go Daddy is Bad for Your Business

I have disliked Go Daddy for years for an amoral reason:  working on sites hosted at Go Daddy is a pain.  And, my pain means cost to my clients.

Go Daddy’s log on and control panel for services are simply confusing.  I suspect deliberately so.  Instead of a clear path to accomplish any task, you’re confronted with non-intuitive menu choices and endless options to buy add-on services.  I always feel like I’m just one errant click away from adding $100 a month to my client’s bill.

Even without mis-clicks, Go Daddy’s electronic maze of confusion is expensive to my clients.  I charge by the hour, and if I cannot get something done quickly, my clients pay for more of my time.

Just this week a client needed a different version of PHP installed on her site. There was no helpful PHP icon on the control panel, nor did a search of the help files reveal how to make the needed settings changes.  Twenty or more minutes later,  I gave up. I submitted a trouble ticket asking for help, emailed my client about the status, and waited for a response to the support request. Next morning, there was no response to the ticket, but my client had replied suggesting that I call Go Daddy’s telephone support because they were good.  They were. I waited only about 5 minutes on hold, spent only 2 minutes or so verifying my right to change things on the account, and then the knowledgeable rep showed me where the apparently undocumented  PHP settings lived in the control panel. I made the change I wanted, and then was told it would take 24 hours for my update to be effective. Because my client was on deadline, I checked periodically while working on other sites to see if the change had been applied. Finally, the right version of PHP appeared, and I was able to get on with site enhancements.

So, let’s say I spent 45 minutes for what should have been five minutes of work.  The cheap $5/month hosting plan isn’t such a bargain after adding in my hourly rate.  And, checking my notes, Go Daddy also cost the same client another hunk of my consulting time in the past 12 months when a Go Daddy bug got in the way of accomplishing what my client wanted.

Why Go Daddy is Bad for Your Karma

Go Daddy's CEO on an Elephant Kill. Source: Wired.com

Go Daddy and its CEO Bob Parsons uses sensitive topics to their commerical advantage. They play with moral issues to make money.

• The over-the-top use of sexy women to sell Go Daddy’s services, at best, pokes fun at women’s equality issues.Is it good-spirited fun? Can you make fun of something while furthering the wrong?I don’t know, since I am not a female attorney, accountant, or designer.

  But there is something uncomfortable to me about financially rewarding sexism.

• Making graphic videos of killing animals for publicity purposes makes me uncomfortable.Just yesterday Go Daddy’s CEO appeared on news shows talking about his kill.  He’s talking it up, justifying and glorifying it.

  I suspect the graphic video and even the shooting are beside the point.

  The point — just like the reason for producing juvenile sex-merrcials,  is publicity for Go Daddy.

Trading on other people’s struggle for equality is wrong.  Killing anything for your own aggrandizement is wrong.  I prefer to not trade with people who do wrong.

My Recommendation: Leave Your Abusive Daddy

If you haven’t yet signed up for web hosting or domain registrations services, pick one other than Go Daddy.

If you are a Go Daddy customer, find out when your services expire.  Move your domain registration to another registrar now — the new one normally extends the registration so the move will cost you nothing.  Sign up for a hosting service and move your web site a few weeks before it is supposed to renew.

Simple.

Ozdachs regularly uses five different web hosting and domain name registration services.
The service we use most frequently has live, US-based tech support. It’s Webmasters.com.