@GoDaddy (and @godaddyhelp) sucks

Don’t click through if you’re not interested in tech complaining. But if you want to read me whining about how GoDaddy sucks, read on….

It’s a pain in the ass to switch web hosts, but man, I wish I had the time to. And I suppose I will soon enough….

About a week ago, I noticed that the program I usually use to write posts – Windows Live Writer (a great free program from Microsoft, for which, best I can tell, there’s no real competition) – simply stopped working with my blog. I got a mysterious error concerning “xmlrpc.php.” A little research revealed this has something to do with the way WordPress allows me to submit posts without using their web page to do so. A little more research revealed that a lot of people have had this problem over time. And a little more? That a lot were having it right at that moment.

I disabled all my plugins, I did all sorts of tests, but nothing worked. I messaged GoDaddy to ask if they had any insight. They asked all sorts of questions, had me do all sorts of work (including adding them as an editor of my blog, which made me just a little uncomfortable). They told me they couldn’t replicate my error. They even suggested I didn’t have the error I said I had, that I hadn’t been encountering it, and asserted affirmatively that if I had encountered this problem, it wasn’t their doing (“Access logs on our network and showed no recent connections from the IP provided. Confirmed no block on our end.”).

Well, of course, this turned out to be untrue.

A little more research on my part, and I stumbled on a report in a WordPress support forum from a user who said she had been told by GoDaddy tech support that they had blocked this service because of a “security vulnerability.” I mentioned this to GoDaddy – that contrary to what they told me, they had told at least one other person that they had in fact caused this problem.

“That is correct XML-RPC is currently disabled until any security vulnerabilities have been fixed. Once confirmed it will be reactivated.”

This is maddening: two days of back and forth, and I don’t know whether to imagine they were lying to me or incompetent.

GoDaddy sends me e-mail all the time telling me to buy more from them. They have a completely incomprehensible menu of products and services, designed (clearly) to fleece those of us who aren’t so tech-savvy. But when they do something that radically affects me, that eliminates my ability to interact with my blog as I’m accustomed to interacting with it, not only do they not notify me, they don’t even seem to know they’ve done it.

Damn.

(And then, today, I discovered that the problem seems to have been fixed. Again – no notification from GoDaddy. It’s clear they’re more focused on taking my money than on providing me with service.)

And, on an unrelated note, I can’t eat lunch til the local anaesthetic in my mouth wears off. In the meantime, I’ll just sit here drooling.

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