GoDaddy and the virtual army of web page hangers
For the past few days or so I’ve been working on converting a regular brochure website into a content managed Wordpress website. The previous web… er, I don’t know what to call them actually. Certainly they are not designers or developers or anything of the sort that might have real technical knowledge. If they were they would provide real value with their service and there would be some keyword meta tags along with a stat counter on the site. Let’s call them web page hangers. The Internet is full of these page hangers who are out calling themselves “web developers” and such. It’s a reseller scam set up by the big hosting companies designed to rip-off the unknowing buyer of Internet services.
So the previous web page hanger had the website and the email hosted at 1and1. Not a problem; I have all my stuff hosted at 1and1. The only problem is that the customer thinks everything is hosted at GoDaddy, where they purchased the domain name. They are not even aware that their website is actually saved at and hosted from 1and1.
The page hanging company simply entered 1and1’s name servers in the DNS and pointed the whole shebang away from GoDaddy to their hosting account at 1and1 where they have set up an external domain record and some mx records for a few email forwarding accounts. Fairly standard from a technical standpoint but from a business perspective this practice is extremely bad form and I see it over and over again.
About 80% of new website clients over the past decade have had this problem where getting information — like a user name and password — from the previous provider is like pulling teeth. The page hangers basically have the customer’s site held hostage until the client gets someone who knows how to cut the strings and say farewell. I’ve seen cases where unscrupulous web page hangers were charging literally thousands of dollars over a year to make the simplest of changes.
So I got everything switched back to GoDaddy and have been using GoDaddy’s hosting service. This is my first GoRound with GoDaddy and at this point I must say that GoDaddy is about the worst piece of Internet software I have ever used to manage an Internet account, and I’ve been around a very long time. I thought 1and1’s user interface sucked but GoDaddy makes 1and1 seem like a world-class operation.
GoDaddy is so bad I can’t be sure it’s not made that way on purpose to somehow enhance sales through trickery. For example I almost bought a pack of forwarding accounts when i didn’t need them because you don’t know you have them until you activate a credit, which is of course buried in the maze of incomprehensible, unintuitive, bifurcated, navigation choices that never seem to lead to the same place. Kudos to their 24/7 telephone support, but the fact that you need it so much speaks volumes about the site and it’s nearly worthless on-line help facilities.
Furthermore they — both the page hangers and the service providers — somehow dupe people into buying stuff they don’t need. My client has the GoDaddy deluxe email package, domain protection, and business registration that they don’t use and don’t need. The hidden, free forwarding accounts is all they needed.
I can see why the page hangers didn’t want to use GoDaddy’s service — after being set up with 1and1 they probably couldn’t figure out how to get anything done at GoDaddy.
