How GoDaddy.com is ripping you off.

I have to say that it's hard to quantify my experience with godaddy. On the one hand, they give users a decent amount of storage space, bandwidth, and email accounts for a relatively reasonable price. On the other hand, their user interface is almost impossible to navigate, and every single time I try to do something complicated, I am informed that it may take up to 24 hours to take effect.

Still, quite a few of my clients come to me having already bought a 1 or 2 year contract with them, so weather I like them or not, I find myself dealing with their system fairly often.

Let me tell you straight up: They are NOT the cheapest hosting plan out there, no matter what you might have heard.

My current client thought that she was all ready to go after having purchased a 1-year recurring contract for a domain name, some free email accounts, and her godaddy instantpage©. I'm sure godaddy was happy to let her foster this illusion.

So she comes to me to set up her website, and after getting a pretty good page design put together, I log in to godaddy, and discover that although she has a domain name, she does not have any kind of web hosting: just godaddy's instant page.

After helping the client through the process of buying a hosting account (which is 60 dollars a year, and this is in addition to what she paid for her domain name) a process that involved having to turn off quite a few "custom options" that were automatically switched on, we got the hosting account up and running.

So once everything is running properly (it took more than 5 hours for her hosting account to be activated) I log in to set up the wordpress installation. After waiting another hour for that to take effect, I go to the wp-admin page, and what do you think?

Yep, 404. So I check out the simple /wordpress/ directory where the sample wordpress page is supposed to appear, and to my surprise, the instantpage page comes up.

So what is going on? Well I will tell you.

Apparently all of godaddy's features that operate without a hosting account are hosted on some OTHER server with a different IP address. So when you deactivate the Instantpage, it does NOT automatically set the homepage of your site to your hosting account, and you have to go and manually change the DNS zone file.

In retrospect, it would have been much simpler if I had had her buy her hosting account AFTER turning off instantpage. Then the hosting installation would have automatically fixed the zone file, or at least one would HOPE that was the case.

So yeah. Godaddy products are very easy to install. But UNinstalling? Not so much.
Not to mention that the entire time I was doing this, there were continually a thousand little options hanging around the corners of the screen for more probably usless things I could buy.

Seriously, godaddy, I've had enough trouble with just ONE of your proprietary products. Do you REALLY think I'm going to get more of them?

My advice: If you absolutely must use godaddy, do as little as possible through their user interfaces. Either upload with an external FTP like fetch or filezilla, or immediately install wordpress and do everything through the admin dashboard. There is just no reason to bother with anything godaddy is selling.