My experiences with GoDaddy
When I evaluate my experiences with businesses, I'm looking for 3 things: quality, service, and value. Any large organization should meet my expectations for atleast 2 of these 3 (or else they shouldn't be successful). GoDaddy meets, and exceeds my expectations quite regularly.
- Quality. GoDaddy is reliable. You get what you're paying for. I've never had my website "just go down" - no power outages, no un-expected down time. It just works. The interfaces for controlling your shared hosting environment are easy to use, and straight forward. It'd be nice if changes you commit were executed instantly, but I've never had a serious problem with the interactions through their managment website.
- Service. I've never had a nicer customer service experience than with GoDaddy (exception: Microsoft MSDN Universal's support was amazing too). To contrast, I've had more than one bad experience with Regster.com customer service, and Register charges more than GoDaddy.
- Value. GoDaddy is extremely inexpensive. Not "cheap" - inexpensive. They most certainly beat Register.com on pricing hands down. I requested a list of all of my transactions with Register.com over the years, and when I got it in the mail, I was very happy I had since switched over to GoDaddy. As long as GoDaddy keeps their prices low, I see them succeeding for a long time.
From Register.com to GoDaddy
I was a satisfied customer of Register.com for more than 3 years until I recommended GoDaddy to my friend for a simple website.
We signed my friend up for his website in less than 15 minutes (8 minutes to come up with the domain name). It came out to $8 for the domain name and a month of shared hosting. "Great", I thought. "That was easy, and very inexpensive."
Now for the kicker. I was very surprised when my friend told me that GoDaddy called him the next day to make sure his experience was going smoothly. That's the sort of attention I would've expected for the prices I was paying at Register.com, but GoDaddy is close to free for shared hosting, and they were calling. I was, and continue to be impressed by GoDaddy's customer service.