My Experience With GoDaddy Customer Service

byTimothyBalla

1.7K followers

Updated 10 months ago

Hello Everyone

I have some experience with GoDaddy customer service and I want to share my thoughts about GoDaddy overall and their customer service. It has been a mostly positive experience but I want to discuss some key points about why WA is better for hosting websites.

Why Did I Choose GoDaddy?

Prior to creating a GoDaddy account I have seen a lot of ads for GoDaddy on TV and everywhere online mainly advertising domains and sales. In late 2022 when I was starting a website for my main business that I started a few months earlier I chose to go with GoDaddy for WordPress Hosting.

Here is why I did this. Firstly this was before I came back to WA in late 2022 and at the time I had no plans of coming back to WA so I knew I needed to look elsewhere for domain registration and hosting. I also wanted a .com.au domain for this business so I needed to find a domain registrar that could do this.

I looked up a list of domain registers on Google that would let you buy and register a .com.au domain and out of all the ones that came up GoDaddy was one of the only ones on the list I have heard of and had the best reputation. So I chose them, signed up and bought my domain.

GoDaddy Hosting Pricing & Experience

Before I talk about the customer service side of things with GoDaddy I want to first go over what the hosting is like on GoDaddy compared to WA. I choose WordPress hosting because I was already familiar with WordPress and I really like it.

My domain registration cost $22 for 1 year and the hosting plan I choose was the unlimited one that allows me to have unlimited traffic and visitors to my website which costs $32 per month. I got it this plan as yearly instead of monthly which cost me $300 and that was at a discounted price.

Later this year when it is time to renew my GoDaddy hosting it will cost $384 and I hope it won't keep going up every year. The reason I chose this unlimited plan was because I wanted to save the time of upgrading later if I got too much visitors for the cheaper plans.

Another thing worth mentioning is that privacy protection for your website is not included in their and costs and additional $17.99 per year if you want it which I have not paid for but it is included for each of your website for free on WA.

In case you are wondering this plan only allows me to host 1 website like their other WordPress plans do but with unlimited traffic, visitors and bandwidth. As for my website speeds and the hosting overall it's ok but not as good as WA.

GoDaddy Hosting Speeds

My website that I have with GoDaddy usually takes up to 5 seconds to load and sometimes slightly longer than that. There has been time where it loaded a bit faster but most of the time it takes at least 5 seconds to load and is longer on a mobile device.

I have also noticed the images on my website take a bit of time to load as well and browsing my website takes a few seconds to load between posts and pages as well. Compared to WA this is bad because all of my websites that are hosted at WA load almost instantly or within 1 to 2 seconds.

The only time I have experienced slow load times with my websites hosted at WA was if I was having problems with my internet connection which is no fault of WA. But other than that my websites hosted at WA always load very fast. Images also load faster and navigation is easier and faster to. This means that Wealthy Affiliate is the winner for hosting and takes the cake hands down.

GoDaddy Customer Service

Now I want to talk about GoDaddy customer service. I had to contact them 2 or 3 times when I first got my website with them. The first time was when I purchased my domain. When you are registering a .com.au domain you have to fill out a registration form and provide your ABN.

I got no registration form for some reason which could have been because of my ad blocked but I'm not sure. I contacted GoDaddy customer service via live chat and told them about the situation. I asked them if they could send me the registration form again. The man I spoke to said they could not do that but don't worry the domain is mine and it could take up to 48 hours for registration to complete.

He told me to keep an eye on my email for updates. I had a feeling he was wrong and it turned out I was right. He had no idea what he was talking about. I waited 48 hours and I got an email saying the registration failed. I contacted GoDaddy again via live chat and this time I spoke to a nice lady. She investigated for me and it turned out it was because the registration form wasn't completed.

So I asked her what I should do as I paid for the domain and want it registered. She said it's no longer available and I need to pick a new one and she will give it to me for free to replace the one I purchased. I didn't like this and i checked using the domain searcher on GoDaddy and saw it was still available. So I advised the lady of this and she said if that's the case I need to add it to my cart again but don't pay for it.

So I did this and let her know when I was finished. I then had to email her a copy of my receipt from the day before to prove I purchased it which I did straight away. I then waited about 20 minutes or so while the technical team helped the lady fix things up on their end and then I got another message asking to checkout but it will be $0 this time.

So I did and it was $0. I disabled my ad blocker this time to be safe and the registration form came up straight away. I completed it and I got an email almost instantly with a receipt and certificate saying registration was successful. I was very thankful to the lady for all of her help and her time and we ended the chat session.

The Confusing Email

At this point I also received another email from GoDaddy with an authorization code but I had no idea what it was for as the email didn't say what it was for. I was confused by so I went back on to GoDaddy live chat again and sent a screenshot of the email asking what the authorization code was for.

After a few minutes I was answered by a man that wasn't too good with his English but I could still understand what he was typing. He checked the authorization code for me and after a few minutes he replied again advising the authorization code was for if I ever wanted to transfer my domain from GoDaddy to another hosting provider. I thanked him and we ended the chat session.

SSL Problems & The Final Chat Session

After this I purchased my hosting and set up my website and tried to login but I was getting an SSL error which was strange because my hosting plan included a free SSL certificate. I left things as they were for the night and tried again the next day but I was still having the same problem. So I contacted GoDaddy customer service again via live chat.

By this point I was getting quite frustrated and I was ready to ask for a refund if there were anymore problems after this as I just wanted to get on with starting work on my website. After a few minutes in queue I was answered by man that I can't remember if it was one of the people I had spoken to previously or someone else but he was nice and helpful.

He asked a couple of questions like what my customer number was and if I have tried things like refreshing the page and clearing cache which I answered yes to. The man then asked me to wait a few minutes while he investigated. After about 10 minutes or so I got a reply from him.

He asked me to try logging in again so I did and it worked straight away. There was no more SSL error, I could login as normal and my website was now showing it was secure and was https. I'm not sure what he did or what the problem was because he didn't tell me. But I thanked him and we ended the chat session. I was finally able to login to my website and start working on it.

Since then there has been no more problems and it's been around 6 months or maybe a bit longer that I have had my main business website with GoDaddy. Everything has been working fine and it still does. I have no idea why had so many problems in the beginning but I'm just happy that my website stayed working and that it is still working fine.

GoDaddy Vs Wealthy Affiliate

As you read I had a few problems with GoDaddy in the beginning which shouldn't have happened. I'm just thankful I got what I paid for eventually and I ended up with a working website that still works fine. I'm going to sum things up by comparing GoDaddy to Wealthy Affiliate.

GoDaddy

• Okay Hosting
  
• Below Average Load Times
• Below Average Navigation
• Website Is Slower On Mobile Devices
• Average Customer Service
• Hosting Plans Are Expensive
• You Can Only Host 1 Website
• Privacy Protection Not Included

Wealthy Affiliate

• Great Hosting
• Fast Load Times
• Above Average Navigation
• Website Is Fast On Mobile Devices
• Amazing Site Support And Customer Service
• Membership Is A Great Price And Includes A Lot More Than Hosting
• You Can Host Multiple Websites Which Is Determined By Your Membership Level
• Privacy Protection Is Included For Free With All Your Website That You Host On Wealthy Affiliate

If you can't tell already Wealthy Affiliate is the winner here hands down. I have had nothing but amazing things with the hosting and support here on Wealthy Affiliate. My websites are fast and always work. I have no complaints with the hosting here on Wealthy Affiliate.

As for GoDaddy I will be staying with them for the website I have hosted there which is my main business website because I don't feel like moving it and a lot of hosting providers don't allow you to register a .com.au domain. My website with GoDaddy is a bit slow as I talked about above but I will just have to stick with it.

I haven't had to get in contact with GoDaddy customer service since the problems I had in the beginning that I discussed in this blog post. However my website seems to be getting slower over time so I might get in contact with them again if this keeps happening.

I also have some other domains at GoDaddy and a GoDaddy Auctions account which costs $7.99 per year. But I won't be hosting these other domains and I will be just holding on to them for the time being. I did try my hand at domain flipping as well but I will be discussing that in a future blog post.

Conclusion

Overall my experience with GoDaddy has been mostly good aside from the problems I had in the beginning and my slow website speeds. GoDaddy customer service is average.

The downsides are that some of the experts don't know what they are doing and some don't speak or type very good English. But you get this problem almost everywhere you go there is always someone who doesn't know what they are doing or doesn't speak or type very good English. But there are many GoDaddy experts there that are nice and very helpful which is good.

On a side note another one of my new websites on WA has been indexed in Google which happened yesterday. I haven't even done any work on it yet besides choosing a theme and I haven't written any content on it yet either. So I'm very surprised but happy that this has happened. Google sure does work in mysterious ways.

My WA rank is now at 30 which is the best rank I have ever gotten to on WA. My hard work is definitely paying off and I'm so close to becoming an ambassador. I can't believe it and this is something I never thought would happen. I can't wait to see what happens next and If I actually get a chance to become a WA ambassador.

Finally I hope you enjoyed this blog post. I know it was a bit long and it is something that is not talked about that often on WA. But I wanted to share my experience with GoDaddy to show how why WA is the better choice. I hope this blog post helps someone. Thank you for reading. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.