Why I dumped GoDaddy
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
After a week of updating nameservers and redesigning blogs and updating WordPress plugins and installs, I can finally write on my web empire once more. My first topic on my new host (I went with iPage if you’re curious), is why I dumped my old host, GoDaddy.
I used to trumpet GoDaddy as a wonderful company, and they were, at least to their relatively new customers. I bought 15 whole months of hosting from them and was happy how easy it was to get started with WordPress and start writing posts. Then, I started having problems, particularly with their billing practices.
For two straight months, each one of the three credit and debit card numbers that I had given them over the last few years had been wrongly charged without prior notice, sometimes for products that I hadn’t even ordered. They were also overzealous, renewing domains and my email hosting account weeks before they were due for renewal. These practices caused checks to my power and DSL companies to bounce and even resulted in Qwest disconnecting my home internet for two days.
I continue to receives emails with an almost threatening tone to them saying that If I don’t renew certain products right away that there will be consequences in the form of “missing out” on great deals. GoDaddy didn’t seem to understand that like most human beings, I have to live on a budget, and a razor thin one as a college student, and that each purchase has to be planned in advance, particularly $60 to $80 hosting purchases. I know, I am poor and I don’t really care.
Then Leo Laporte started talking about GoDaddy (or as he and Scoot Bourne referred to them, “the one with the sexy race car driver“) talking about some of the business practices that they practice. The main example was the trumpeting of company founder Bob Parsons over pulling their business out of China shortly after Google did the same. Clearly riding on the coattails of an internet giant and not mentioning that less than 1% of their business comes from China and that there is no significant loss to them.
I certainly hope that my experience with my new host is a lot better than the past one, and so far it has been very good. iPage has a good support staff and a system of hosting just as good as GoDaddy’s and it was significantly less cost than what GoDaddy wanted to renew my account. If only it was easier to move websites from one low cost host to another, but maybe in the future, it will be.
Speaking of which, do you like the integrated design between here and Duo Citizen? Or should I go back to different designs?
A New Beginning
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
Mac User’s Blog recently fell into a state of disarray. I started not really caring about posting everyday, not really caring about the layout of the blog, not really caring about any of it. Now, I’m going to college at Southern Maine Community College and I want to resuscitate my presence online. I’ve spent the last few months trying to develop a new idea, a new blog, one that would be better than my first one. Then, after my one hundredth name idea got shot down by my friends, I decided that I already had a good name and the appropriate domain name to boot.
At one point, the old Mac User’s Blog was getting a couple hundred uniques every month. I understand that this isn’t a lot, but it was good enough for me, especially considering how many different countries were represented. The United States and Canada as well as Great Britain, France, Kuwait, and the UAE. I hope that I can generate that kind of traffic again with this new version.
Consider this Mac User’s Blog 2.0 if you will. I have moved over to a WordPress platform and I’m planning on buying some of the available upgrades so that I can further customize and host more content here. One of the reasons I didn’t make this switch earlier was an unwillingness to move my Blogger posts over to the platform. Hence, I will not be transferring my posts from 2004 , 2005, 2006, and early 2007. They will remain archived at the old Blogger blog. Meanwhile, stay tuned in here for this new beginning.