GoDaddy can be a Nightmare
GoDaddy, a web host I use for several sites, won’t let existing IIS6 accounts be upgraded to IIS7 without having to cancel your hosting account and recreating it. I emailed them about the problem, and their response was that this is a setting that needs to be set at account setup. Unfortunately, I setup my account quite a while ago, before IIS7 was around. They don’t have a clear upgrade path for their existing customers, which is quite baffling to me. It seems like they are providing incentive for their oldest customer base to leave towards more technically oriented hosting providers. I just wrote an ASP.NET MVC app, which pretty much requires IIS7 in a medium trust environment. Little did I know until it’s too late, that I can’t deploy it and have the url routing work on my hosting account.
Cancelling a hosting account and recreating it is a big deal. To start with, I just moved an existing domain to this particular hosting account, and ICANN won’t let you move it again for two months. Then, there’s having to back up all your files, all your data, all your stored procedures and everything else. Upgrading my web.config is going to be pain enough without all this other hassle to deal with. Seriously, if they don’t fix this, when I cancel my account, I won’t be opening a new one up. That’s far too heavy a price to pay over and over again as they keep screwing their existing customers like this.
On top of all this, GoDaddy is a middle-of-the-road hosting provider. Their hosting and domain management tools are slow and lack a cohesive nature – each toolset is essentially it’s own isolated app that doesn’t share logged in sessions, so you have to re-login all the time. They’ve got tools strewn all over the place and their website is way too busy. To top it all off, their documentation is mostly nonexistant.
The only really nice things that GoDaddy has going for it are their hosted app setup (they can manage a WordPress install, for example), and they have low rates. Either way, definitely something to think about. It’s pretty funny, too, that I’m using GoDaddy hosting to complain about GoDaddy hosting, yay!
December 6th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Let me get this straight. You’re the idiot who wrote a script that requires IIS7 when you’re on an IIS6 server, which YOU chose during your hosting set up, and this is GoDaddy’s fault?
Next time, know what you need before YOU mess things up.
December 6th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I opened my account before IIS7 was available on Godaddy. I wasn’t aware at the time I wrote my MVC website that it would have troubles working on Godaddy – ASP.NET MVC doesn’t require IIS7, but you have to be able to install an ISAPI module to get it working on IIS 6, which isn’t possible in the Godaddy medium trust environment.
It seems like if I want to take advantage of the same features that Godaddy offers it’s new customers at the exact same price I’m paying, they should accommodate me – I’m a long-paying client, after all. Plus, what happens when IIS 8 comes out? I guess I have to cancel my account again, right?
December 8th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Hi there,
I’m sorry that you think we disrespect our hosting customers. I came across your article and want to work with you on this. Please email the domain name and I do my best to try and assist you with the migration.
As for the other items you mentioned, once I have the domain I can do some more research on the slowness. It would also help if you could tell me what you would like to see improve with our tools and documentation.
Thanks in advance for your assistance!
Regards,
Alicia R.
Go Daddy Hosting
December 15th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Hey Jon,
Here’s a double bird out to godaddy from me. Not for any reason except their beyond crappy website, and the complete chaos that lies within.
February 16th, 2009 at 6:12 am
i was in similar situation. I have been using godaddy windows hosting for several years now. Recently i wanted to try joomla and their website does say it can be installed in windows hosting. When i tried to install I couldn’t so I called the help desk. They told me that I need IIS 7. I was like….what the…because I had installed and tested joomla in IIS6 in my test server at home. And I asked them if they could move my hosting from IIS6 to IIS7. They told they can’t but I have to buy one month IIS7 hosting, cancel my old hosting and they would transfer my credit to new hosting.
So, i had to do what they said. Now the problem is when i try to setup this new hosting I have to link a domain name. So, when i tried to link it, it gives an error “Your domain … is not available for this hosting account. Setup can not continue because this domain is being used by the following application: Hosting”
24 hrs has already passed and I still cannot link my domain name to this hosing. I swear i hate godaddy!!
February 21st, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Try this:
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute(“{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}”);
routes.MapRoute(
“Default”, // Route name
“”, // URL with parameters
new { controller = “Home”, action = “Index”, id = “” } // Parameter defaults
);
routes.MapRoute(
“Default.aspx”, // Route name
“{controller}.aspx/{action}/{id}”, // URL with parameters
new { controller = “Home”, action = “Index”, id = “” } // Parameter defaults
);
}
April 7th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I do agree with few things you have mentioned, I have had and still having problems asking them to install .NET 3.5 SP1. I don’t understand the problem in installing .NET 3.5 SP1. Godaddy do have shared login sessions meaning you don’t have to login for every app. within godaddy(atleast as far as I have noticed)
But I fould http://www.softsyshosting.com who provide all the similar features that Godaddy provide with almost similar price. They even support .NET 3.5 SP1. Give them a try.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Well, GoDaddy can be a Nightmare. This is not a one-man cry, but around the word people who become greedy for few dollars while hosting, are having this sound either loud or in their heart.
Most of the things mentioned in the article are JUST TRUE.
And over that, the Free Hosting Account is another joke that GoDaddy tells to it’s domain name buyers. People mostly think of it if they could have this fee hosting for the test period of their website and as soon it will reach to the alpha release, they will shift it to some paid hosting. Let me share annoying things i faced during my first (and obviously Last) experience with GoDaddy.
- I registered a domain name with godaddy.com and was happy to have a Free Windows Hosting for ASP.NET 2.0 with MS SQL Server 2005
- GoDaddy never mentioned it before that with this Free Hosting Account i can not use any FTP client software, and i have to mess with their slow File uploading utilities.
- Well, i just hosted my ASP.net 2.0 applications in one way or other and created the MS SQL database from their online database management tool (i.e. huh another joke i was not aware of that untill i came across)
- What would you expect at this moment, after suffering this much, is to have an Ad Supported website up with database interation, am i right? BUT i came to know the worst thing ever is that my ASP.net application can not connect to MS SQL database directly with Free Hosting Account (damm, but the worst moment is comming in next lines).
- Finally after looking at this useless Free Hosting Account, i had to go over buying a Paid Hosting and i went for that so that i may move my domain to this BUT the final mess was that there was no way to remove my domain name from their Free hosting application and when ever i tried to bind my domain name with that paid hosting plan, it raised an error like “the domain name xxx.xxx is unavailable. Because it is being hosted at : hosting”. Where “hosting” is the free hosting account of GoDaddy.
- No way left except to wait for some miracle which will make my precious domain name free from GoDaddy’s free “hosting” account
- And GoDaddy’s (email) support is just the cheapest i found on internet, i.e. you should not expect any reply before atleast 24hours (after a complete working day you wouldn’t be sure of what you will be replied will resolve your problem or not)
This is what GoDaddy.com is
So beware of using GoDaddy other than buying a Domain Name (or better if you can go for other for this even so that you might not have to loose your domain name due to such any Free Hosting account whith GoDaddy gives you at must)
May 29th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Getting an asp.net mvc app up on godaddy with iis7 works after you change the advanced setting to integrated. Their support was not able to tell me this, but it does work as long as you copy all of your project’s dll’s over as well. This is necessary because they don’t have 3.5 sp1 installed.
September 4th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Yeah had the same problem. Switched form a Windows to Linux server and when i tried to set the account up again I got an error message:
Setup can not continue because this domain is being used by the following application: Hosting.
So I contacted the support team at Godaddy and I got the following answer to my problem:
Thank you for contacting online support. This error message occurs sometimes because it can take up to 24 hours for our system to process the removal of domains from hosting some times. It appears that this is still processing, please be sure to let us know if it does not allow you to set this up by the end of tomorrow so we can check its status.
I have found that .com’s takes time for the account to remove itself from the system (24 hours +)and i also found that .co.uk’s remove quite quickly (within the hour)
Still waiting for the .com to move and it’s been at least 24 hours.
Frustrating when you want to get on and work.
December 14th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
CAN BE ?? IT IS!
Godaddy is only good for domains! remember that
and HOST your money making sites with a PRO HOSTING company
if you dont want to LOOSE MONEY because of SUCK-ASS godaddy hosting!
January 14th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Title…
Very interesting post. I would like to link back to it….
January 14th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Title…
Very interesting post. I would like to link back to it….
April 29th, 2010 at 6:01 am
True. GoDaddy is really a nightmare. It sends you creeps. And it robs you. That’s the reason why I changed to arvixe. After reading review for arvixe and asking for suggestions from my friends,I am now happy I made a change. Almost the same price but comes with satisfaction.
May 4th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
I have a similar problem. I did try the free hosting but i didn’t know that there’s no way to remove the domain from the free hosting and switch it to the paid hosting. Now I can’t setup the paid hosting which i paid for as the free hosting is still “pending removal” with domain locked to it. Somehow i’m already very angry at Godaddy and i never really got to use the paid hosting. What a shame! The domain would be available if their application just allowed it. This is just artificial limination and nothing else. They also make you buy a lot of domains as they won’t allow you use the same domain name on multiple hosting accounts although it’s technically possible.
Arrgh. How do they manage to do this? What a nightmare.
September 4th, 2010 at 10:26 am
I TOTALLY AGREE with you. Just got finished going through the entire NIGHTMARE with GoDaddy.
My Account was initially setup as IIS6. Everything was fine until I wanted to install one of the Blog softwares from GoDaddy’s ‘My Applications’ page. The software I wanted required IIS7, so I upgraded my account, it’s free after all, right? NOT!
The application installed successfully or so I was told. However, it DID NOT WORK at all. Even the web pages I had previously running were now showing \Resource not Found\ errors all over the place!! Nothing worked properly anymore. I dinked and dinked and dinked for a week on settings, web.config files, config this, config that, etc…. still nothing worked and GoDaddy’s Help/Support was useless. You wait several hours for an email response that just says to check your web.config file. WHAT!?!? To me that was the most obvious thing to check. I waited hours for that help and support???!!!?????
If you have a faint heart and would like to keep your hair, I HIGHLY recommend just buying and maintaining the Web Server hardware/software yourself.
November 3rd, 2010 at 11:02 am
Just to let you know. Go Daddy does not support SQL 2008 database in any way….. sigh….
November 17th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Well just as other users have found out, I too have been stung by the “Setup can not continue because this domain is being used by the following application: Hosting” issue. I registered my domain last year, had set up basic hosting included with the domain purchase and decided later to move to my own hosting and just pointing all url requests to the “new” site being hosted remotely. All was working fine until after a hardware failure I decided to try GoDaddy’s own WebHosting and use their WebSite Tonite. After trying to remove the domain from “Hosting” it’s stuck at “removal pending”. As someone else mentioned the (IMO) best use of GoDaddy is as simply a domain registar and host your site elsewhere… or pay up (throuhg all the nickel and diming they do) and get an all inclusive premium hosting along with the associated monthly charge, each varying by different levels/plans. All in all not a very user friendly experience, and this is ONLY having to deal with hosting and use of thier website builder and doesn’t even begin to touch upon the issues with IIS, SQL etc.
January 11th, 2011 at 11:08 am
Go Daddy’s site is a mess – cluttered, confusing, searches through Google turn up things that GD’s search will not show, customer support argued with me when I had a problem – “use the form” but there is no form, yes there is. . .etc. Looks like a site designed by techs with no designers and no one who cares about consistency in language and instruction. Thye are hosting three of my sites but if I still had just one, I would not sign up for any additional hosting. Reminds me of my few years of hell trying to get my Windows 98 machine to work properly – solved all my problems by switching to Macs.
March 11th, 2011 at 11:16 pm
The worst part about GoDaddy is when you call their support for help, you get sales people trying to sell you other products! I’ve had most of the problems mentioned above, and I can honestly say GoDaddy is not worth the trouble.
June 14th, 2011 at 1:14 pm
I have registered three domain with godaddy and two of them has been using free linux hosting with ad coming over site.
Just now I have added Linux deluxe hosting plan and now my journey to disappointment started. I cant understand on each step why they want to sell all of their product. If we will need something we will contact them. I tried to call for customer support , but cant belive this i waited for 8 minutes and that was an ISD call and all the time i have been listening “Your call is important Please wait, all operators are busy” after 8 mnite of call I just hanged up in frustation.
I think godaddy is good for buying domain , thats it. U cant imagine hosting your website here specially if you are a developer, for non technical person its a sin to use godaddy , i bet it.
My problem: I wanted to remove my free hosted domain and wanted to host it with my deluxe plan , but after a long mail trail , i have not been able to remove my free hosted sites , i did all possible things. When i select the domain to remove the remove icon is not highlighted and it doesnt allow me to remove it. The server response is so slow and just add some more degree of frustation. I have worked with other hosting server they were really fast.
My suggestion: If you want to buy domain , use godaddy. But if you want to host your website , NEVER EVER think of godaddy. They are there just to sell their product just worth of trouble. They have pathetic support and worst telephone support. I dont know how they are surviving in this business.
June 14th, 2011 at 1:17 pm
If anybody could suggest me about some good hosting provider, i’ll appreciate it.
I just want to get rid of go daddy.