Friday, April 25, 2008

What GoDaddy Gets Right

Today I needed to sort out a DNS oops I made with a client, and decided calling GoDaddy technical support would be the best way to get it taken care of (which, by the way, was right!). Now, I actually have a handful of negative things to say about GoDaddy as a hosting provider, but, one thing they absolutely do nail is offering access to their customer support.

I visited their website, and sure enough, on the home page is the 24/7 phone number:

Also, included with a sign-up e-mails is the number, right below the other pertinent information:

I have to say, I'm impressed. All too often, getting a human on the phone at a web company is nearly impossible - so for them to push their number as much as they do, is just awesome.

Perhaps, just like Zappos wants you to return those shoes, GoDaddy wants you to call them?

Either way, it's good to see them spending money on more than just Super Bowl commercials.

2 comments:

  1. You're probably the first person on the planet to say that. I've never heard anyone say anything good about GoDaddy, other than they are cheap.

    If you don't believe me, try doing a Google search for "godaddy sucks".

    I use GoDaddy for some basic hosting, and performance is pretty pathetic, but I can't complain for $3.99 a month. I also use their SMTP relay service since Cox blocks all outgoing port 25 traffic that's not to one of their SMTP servers. I had a problem a few months ago, where all of my outgoing mail was lagging 6 hours or more. I contacted support through their online Email Support System on 2/12 at 6:08PM. I got a half-assed response from them on 2/13 at 8:28AM. Of course, 14 hours later the problem had already either corrected itself or had been internally noticed and corrected.

    Better yet, here was my original request:
    I am having SMTP relay issues. Email sent over 2 hours ago (to multiple
    recipients) have not yet been received. I sent a test email, did not
    receive. I am not over my relay limit for the day.


    and here is their response:
    Thank you for contacting support,

    Did you setup the email through a 3rd party client like outlook? Is
    there a bounceback message or error that occured.

    We would like to be of assistance. However, the nature of your inquiry
    is unclear and additional information is necessary in order to properly
    investigate and address your inquiry.

    Please reply to this email with a detailed description of what is
    happening. Be sure to include the full text of any error messages you
    may be encountering as well as any account information that you have,
    including the domain name and customer number in question. In addition,
    it may be necessary to release account specific information in our
    response. For security reasons, we cannot release customer specific
    account information without first verifying the account. If you have not
    done so already, include the last four digits of a payment method on
    file or your four-digit Call-in PIN with your reply. Once you have
    provided this information, we can investigate the matter further.

    If immediate assistance is required, our telephone support staff is
    available 24/7 at 480-505-8877.
    We look forward to hearing from you.

    We look forward to serving you in the future.


    Needless to say, I wasn't going to bother trying to explain to them that it was a Postfix email server at my house that was sending the email, and not an Outlook email client. I was also pretty annoyed at the fact that in the "we got your inquiry" email that they send right after you contact support, they don't bother including the "if this is important call us" part that they included in the response 14 hours later.

    I suppose I would have gotten better customer service if I had contacted them initially via phone. It's a shame that those of us who try to be "nice" by sending email support questions, end up getting worse service than if we had screamed over the phone.

    So there you have it. Godaddy is (IMHO) pretty good for cheap domain registration and management, which for me rarely requires any sort of support, but I'd steer clear of them for pretty much anything else.

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  2. Hey Mark -

    No disagreement that their service leaves a lot to be desired.

    All I was saying was that I was impressed that they had the guts/brains to put their phone number front and center.

    I don't actually recommend them these days for hosting - just for buying names from.

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