My nightmare Monday, thanks to Godaddy
LATER UPDATE: With the help of Adam Fendelman, I came to an agreement with Godaddy: I manage to retrieve all the data, they refund me the money. As regarding the hosting, I continue with them. While I am not happy with what happen, I am happy that we could understand each others in the end. Thanks to all for their support, and special ones goes to Adam.
Monday morning is probably not a happy time for most people. Maybe you partied all weekend, or you stayed up late to read your favorite novel for the third time . But I highly doubt Monday is a nightmare either. At least for 99.9999% of the people. Well, this Monday, I am one of the 0,0001% of the people thanks to godaddy.com.
My blog has been hosted there from the first day — and so are Miti’s blog and Cornel’s blog. Everything was fine until three or four weeks ago, when I received an email that I exceeded my disk quota. Since I have 150 GB of storage and use the account only for three blogs this was a surprise for me. I used FTP to looking at the folders. It seems one of the WordPress modules (the one for backup) was trying to do backups each day. So I deleted the files, and from that moment on I started to look every day or so for new files, just in case. That worked fine until ten days ago when I received an email from godaddy.com, stating:
Dear Mihai Corlan, Customer Number: xxxxxxxxxxxx According to the terms of our agreement(s), we tried to bill your MasterCard card ending in the last two digits XX in the amount of $ 7062.01 for the item(s) below, but our billing attempt failed. This could be for a variety of reasons, including an invalid or expired credit card on file. Product Name Next Billing Date Qty Price Hosting Fee - Additional 100 MB - Renewal 10/22/2008 874 $ 5934.46 Bandwidth/Diskspace for 10/02/2008. corlan.org
You can imagine my heart was suddenly beating faster! How in the world could I owe more than $7000 to godaddy.com? I had paid for the deluxe plan for one year, so why? I tried to find out why they thought I owed them this money. I receive a response asking for the last four numbers of my credit card (but no explanation of why they want to take this money).
This weekend they decided to block the account without any notice, phone call, or explanation. I called them, and they said to me that I have to pay this money because I exceeded the HDD quota.
Funny enough they have an account option called Unlimited (which cost $14 as opposed to my $7) that doesn’t have this limit of 150GB of HDD. So I spent a lot of time asking why they didn’t send me an alert the first time I exceeded the quota, instead of waiting for time to pass and accrue penalties of $7000. Also, I asked which files or folders were so big (“Sorry sir, but the account is blocked and I cannot tell you about the files”). I asked why they don’t send alerts when you first exceed the quota and all the common sense questions. They were polite, but basically they told me that because they have millions of clients they cannot send each one an email. As if in 2008 you have to have a person to check and write an email! Come on, you can hire a Perl programmer who will write you a script and add it as a cron job to check and send alerts wherever you want.
Eventually it became clear to me, that the problem would not be resolved. I told them there is no way to pay $7000 for something that I consider not my fault. I used to be a freelancer for many years; I worked with many hosting sites and never had this problem. Their system seems to be designed that way, just to make some extra money.
After more talking and calls, they offered me this deal: pay $800 for your data, and buy the next hosting plan and we’ll forget about the $7000, even if technically you owe us this money.
So that’s my story,. I still do not believe what happened to me. I spent all day trying to recover the data from Google cache and some old backups. Miti and Cornel are still working to get their blogs up and running.
Sorry for the lost comments, guys!
PS It seems this happened before to other people as well: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-fendelman/why-i-dont-owe-godaddy-65_b_129276.html
Comments
28 Responses to “My nightmare Monday, thanks to Godaddy”
Leave a Reply
[...] I’ve spent several hours trying to restore posts and comments - you can read the whole story here. Sorry if I lost any [...]
[...] cu pachete de 7$ sa fie datori la godaddy cu mii de dolari. De exemplu Andel Fedelman dar si Corlan (bloguri in limba engleza) care a patit acelasi lucru. Daca era o companie mica intelegeam, e foame [...]
This is a very sad story. So, in how many months were those THOUSANDS bucks accumulated? How much is the additional cost for each supplementary 100MB fraction? Normally, they should announce you from the first month when your quota was exceeded. I have also a Deluxe plan with them, and I will check the limits right now (and after that I will think to move my hosting somewhere else). I think this story should be known by anyone, in order that other people to be able to avoid this unpleasant situation. Good luck to solve your situation!
Poate ca se va putea rezolva, vezi cazul: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-fendelman/why-godaddy-refunded-my-9_b_129485.html
I had my own bad experience with them. A friend’s domain expired and since he had no time, he asked me to take care of it, see if I can get it back. They wanted me to pay $80 to get my domain back ! I looked on their site and could not find anywhere that amount, or anything about that. Of course, I never paid, screw them.
I only used them twice to buy a domain but never for hosting. That is clearly a company driven by greed, just have a look at their website with zillions of ads.
Just get your webspace from a real hosting companies and keep local backups.
That post on huffingtonpost.com was picked up by the Consumerist, and you can read their article here: http://consumerist.com/5056063/perhaps-you-dont-owe-godaddy-6579.
If you haven’t already paid the $800, it might not be a bad idea to follow the same steps that Adam did to get the matter resolved. There’s no way you should be paying that much money to resolve an error they basically caused.
@Catalin
As I start to use their services in late June this year, and I receive the email with 7000 last month, do the math
@Dave Duplantis
Thanks for the info! We are evaluating all the options!
@all
In the meantime what hosting company do you use and do you trust?
I would recommend one.com. For 2.60 Euro/Month you get 10GB webspace, unlimited traffic, unlimited email accounts, ASP, PHP, Mysql, FTP, etc.
I use them since some time now and recently I moved my wordpress-based blog there, works without problems.
Sooo ? Simply refuse payment and tell them to F*CK OFF. I am quite sure that what they do is a violation of the most basic laws of e-commerce and e-services, not only here, in Romania, but all over the world. Like they ask you money (and a huge amount too, not like 10 or 50 dollars) for an inexistent service or penalty ? SCREW THEM !
I am very sad to hear that this happened to you, Mihai. This is Adam Fendelman. The same exact thing happened to me. I’m the one who wrote the Huffington Post story you reference above.
I just let the right people at GoDaddy know this just happened to you. I hope they choose to fairly rectify it for you as well. You should have just received an e-mail from me.
[...] Povestea pe larg, aici. [...]
this is a preview… of Tuesday 3 evil clock`s and shit
well
dude, take the hostgator. i have 10 sites, unlimited bandwidth and, i dont know, 200GB space or smth. 9 USD. my sites have somewhere to 15 000 views.
The reason I recommended one.com is that it’s faster for europeans (it’s a dutch hosting company), it’s cheaper than anything I’ve seen and 10GB, while not unlimited, it’s more than enough for any kind of blog, image gallery, backups etc.
@Adam Fendelman
Thanks a lot! I received an email from them, and they started an internal investigation and they will let me know within hours about the result. Thanks again my friend.
I will update my post as soon as I have a final resolution from them.
My pleasure.
[...] dat azi peste niste povesti din care a reiesit o enorma nesimtire din partea lor (1, 2, 3) si mi-am adus aminte ca si eu am patit ceva similar prin [...]
Hello Mihai! If you want reliable and not so expensive hosting contact me on email and we can arrange something to be hosted where Flexer (www.flexer.info) and Romanian Flex User Group (www.fxg.ro) are hosted.
Imi pare rau ca ti s-a intamplat asta. Trebuie sa fiu si eu atent fiindca am cateva conturi si domenii la Godaddy.
Norocul meu e ca daca incearca sa-mi traga tzeapa ma duc peste ei (locuiesc la vreo 20 km de sediul lor din Scottsdale).
Mihai,
Following my GoDaddy situation and story in the Huffington Post, I just wrote up yours as well:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-fendelman/i-didnt-owe-godaddy-65795_b_134528.html
Hmm…this gets out of hand. I am living 10 miles from Godaddy headquarters in Scottsdale, AZ.
Maybe I should pay them a visit! Or send a lawywer…
How come they don’t get their shit together and solve the situation?? It could happen to any of us again (who knows, I could be the next)
I will write about this awkward matter on my tech blog http://www.mytestbox.com because I have a section dedicated to Web Hosting.
And actually, I will write about this also on http://www.thenextweb.org (a well known European tech blog). You will get more exposure there.
Hang on, Mihai and Adam! You are not alone!
OK guys! First of all thank you all for your support, and special thanks goes to Adam Fendelman!
Second, Godaddy gave me my data and refund the money, so I think everybody is happy.
As a final note, my sites remain on Godaddy’s Servers - I am using the Unlimited plan.
Hey, glad to hear everything turned out ok
[...] happened to Mihai Corlan, a Flex, AIR developer who had his website hosted on [...]
Eu zic sa ii arzi putin in stilul lor, mai ales daca sunt ZORRO si au pachet “nelimitat”.
Cumapara unu si baga scriptu sa faca backup in nestire si le consume tot hardu de pe server sa vedem ce motiv baga atunci
Mai mult ca sigur ca au ceva in fine print care sa previna asa ceva si tot iti taie accesul