There are a couple of reasons why I’m migrating off of GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated hosting service.
For one thing, I’m really not all that happy with GD to begin with. While they haven’t done anything lately that has massively pissed me off, they have done so before. Like when they claimed they had backups of my web hosting account stuff. Well, they did, sort of. When I needed it, they wanted to charge me $149 and it would take them two weeks to restore the data. ‘Scuse me? They should be able to rebuild an entire data center in two weeks. Come on. Then there was the time I contacted their tech support (and I do use that term loosely). My virtual dedicated server (their term for a VM) was sputtering and dying, logging thousands of “NIC_NL waiting binding to NETLINK_ISCSI socket” errors. Turns out their host machine was having problems which apparently went undetected for weeks. It seems they didn’t even know it until I emailed their tech support. Then they gave me some bullshit song and dance about “This process is most likely used for an internal purposes and unfortunately due to security reasons we are unable to go more in depth on this process.“ I suspect that means, “We don’t know what it was, so we rebooted the host and it went away”. I don’t know. I suspect they don’t either. It really bothers me, though, that they apparently have no monitoring in place to tell them when things start going south. I just wonder how many people on the same host wiped and re-imaged their VMs trying to fix the problem.Â
Then there is the cost. I have found what appears to be a very good hosting provider that charges 1/3 less per month, and their add-on services like extra bandwidth and disk space – should I ever need them — are FAR less expensive. They also don’t treat their customers like complete imbeciles, and their web site is not a constant barrage of upsell that makes it hard to get to the stuff you’re paying for.  Anyway, I’m switching over to Linode. The prepaid domain registrations and stuff will stay with GD for now, but I have zero allegiance to them – so if someone else has a better deal for domain registration when mine start to expire, I’ll yank that business from them as well.