GoDaddy going to hell

Posted by Jim on May 25, 2005

http://www.godaddy.com and their CEO Bob Parsons http://bobparsons.com

With all the attention on their bobby TV ads and his pontificating on his blog and radioGoDaddy, he seems to have hired a few clowns and idiots in customer service. We invested some time and money in a few domains and GoDaddy’s traffic offering. Its web based, so it should work. Their Google tracking never worked, and their check your stats on major search engines returned some domains as -0- zero placement in major search engines when typing in the domain name would return dozens and hundreds of respone pages.

Net result - godaddy.com refunded the money on the accounts. Why the refund? Because after a week and a half, they could not give us a response on when the problems would be fixed. And the guy in billing - his repsonse, “Hey I issue refunds all the time, its my job”

Yesterday, I offered to run a domain for one of the boards I serve on. I expect the usual level of service from godaddy.com - sign in, type in the name, hit Buy, get bombarded with ads for crap I don’t need, then wait a few seconds and hit Total DNS Control, point the domain to a web server and be off. In some cases, the domains where live with godaddy’s DNS tools as soon as I was done remoting into the web server and configuring the directory and IIS.

Last night, it all fell apart. Hours of nothing. Several calls into customer service being told it takes time to replicate across the Internet, only to get frustrated trying to explain to some customer service under trained exmployee that this was a godaddy tool, not DNS replication across the web. The answer - it takes up to 8 hours and your all set.

This morning, 8 hours later, I go in, and still, Total DNS Control unavailable. I call in, this time its 8 hours. I tell them its 8 hours, and they say they will escelate it, expect it to be fixed within 24 hours.

So at lunch I call in for a status updateL this begins one of 10 calls and emails where the answer constinues to be we don’t know why its not working, it will be escleated, and it takes 24 hours, then it changed to 24-28 hours, then it changed to it can take 24-28 hours or longer. At that point I changed to “refund my money now”. These took 27 minutes - we timed it. Pugilist was on the phone on conference call with me while I was driving down the turnpike. We got a laugh out of the idiots on the phone and their total lack of any effort to understand the problme, let alone actually fix it.

Guy from billing “Yeah, I refund money all the time. Paypal has a thing with us where we just kick the funds back, even easier then credit card payments” So did anyone at godaddy care to fix the problem? No. Explain it? No Have a level of knowledge of how registration, DNS servers and DNS records works above that of the most basic of computer users? No, they had enough knowledge to say the phrase DNS correctly, and replication and propogation. But not use them in the proper context.

Maybe its time for the #1 DNS registrator, www.godaddy.com and http://bobparsons.com to concentrate on staying #1 and les on videos, TV producton companies and radio shows. It takes more to earn a customer then it does to keep a customer. Try and keep a few of them. Fix the problems with your tools. Either they work perfectly in seconds, or they are broke, and majorly fucked up with no sign of a fix. And no one in customer service actually doing customer service.

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