After two long months, I am happy to say I have successfully transferred all of my domains to GoDaddy. Why exactly did I put myself through this… because of poor service at my previous provider UplinkEarth. For over 5 years, I have had my domains with this provider and up to about 6 months ago fairly satisfied with them. However, all of a sudden, I receive an email saying my websites had been hacked and the pages altered to download viruses when users accessed my sites – as a result, they reset my (likely all) FTP accounts because that is how the intrusion took place. Quite alarmed, I immediately logged in and reset my FTP account and repaired my websites. I didn’t think much about it until a few weeks later I get another email saying my websites had been hacked again and the same actions taken to reset everything. Now annoyed, I logged back in, reset my password and repaired the sites. A month later, I get the same message from the administrators again! Now I am livid so I again correct everything and make a decision to look into another provider. Luckily my brother had success with GoDaddy, so I began looking into them.
Guess what happened a few weeks later….
yes, the sites were hacked AGAIN. I login into their website looking for a number to call to find out they are only available on Eastern time until 5:30pm. Being later than that, I have to resort to utilizing their 24 hr mail support option which requires me to submit a ticket, wait for the ticket to be responded to, await for an email saying it has been addressed and then LOG BACK INTO THE ADMIN SITE to read what they responded with. Apparently simply putting the response in the return email is too much effort. Thanks to this restrictive processes, I commit to migrating the website. I will point out at this time that GoDaddy has 24hr live phone support so I was able to acquire my account and initiate the domain transfers at a time convenient to me – excellent support I might add. Unfortunately, I have to work through the UplinkEarth side of the transfer via the support ticket method which only serves to aggravate me more.
In the midst of all of this, my websites get hacked again (the transfers were still in progress). This time it apparently did not come through FTP and little information was given to the root cause. This time instead of simply reseting my passsword, they put in a whole new process that forces me to add my IP address to a white list so I can then log in and view my sites. To top it all off, the white list addition can take up to an hour before it is enabled and although it says I can set the timeout, it only accepts a 4 hour duration. This makes it extremely difficult to extract my data off of the UplinkEarth site for future upload to the new GoDaddy site (I can imagine they were not concerned about this).
Eventually, I get everything moved over and uploaded to the new site. At this point the pain in the head from the old provider’s poor service is intensified by a direct , kick to the head. I called them up to terminate my 5+ year contract – yes, I had to do this at work in order to get a live person on the other end – so I am already on edge. For some reason, in the back of my head (probably where the pain was emanating from), I actually thought they would want some explanation for the termination. The lady answers the phone, I tell here I would like to terminate my contract, she asks for my primary website, my password for that site (luckily I had it written down since I refused to reset it from the random letters they gave me on the last hack notification) and then said “Done” Stunned, I asked if I was going to get anything from them to document the transaction .. “No” just tell them [Name] at extension [ext] if you have any problems. That’s it, no WHY, no CONCERN, no APOLOGY and from my perspective NO CARE. Give me your money or don’t let the door hit your []ss on the way out.
I guess I expected too much, but then again, apparently GoDaddy has no problem meeting and exceeding those supposedly high expectations. Now, does anyone want a recommendation on who to go to for hosting services 8^)
Life Intrigued 
The hours of technical support are a good measure of the quality of any provider. Even a very large company like AT&T/Cingular Wireless has limited hours of support, which of course aligns with the ongoing decay in voice quality of their network. I’ve often maintained that the quality of a college can be determined by looking at their library hours. For example, the Undergraduate and Engineering libraries at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign are open 24 hours a day between Sunday morning and Friday night, and are open all day and evening Saturday. On the other hand, the local College of Dupage library in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, closes at 10pm Mon-Thur, 4:30 Fri-Sat, and 6:00 on Sunday because, after all, who studies on Sunday evening? And this is not necessarily a function of student size: another local college in Illinois, Wheaton College, has a library open until midnight Mon-Thur and until 10:00 Fri-Sat, very impressive for a college of less than 3000 students (the library is closed Sunday, but it’s a Christian faith-based college so I accept that).
Ron
I guess I am a little stunned you happen to know all of these library hours and a tad ashamed at myself not knowing a) the library hours of my Alma Mater-UofI and b) any library hours in my hometown. I blame it on the fact I heavily use the Internet for my research 8^) But I digress …. I would have to agree that this is a very good litmus test for a given school’s focus on education. I honestly can’t think of a good reason why a school would ever close access to their libraries – maybe I can see from a high school perspective there probably isn’t a strong need to keep open after say 1:00am, but from a college perspective I spent many an all-nighters soaking in textbooks and literature. This would likely involve paying someone during those hours, but there is always a few students majoring in library sciences that would benefit from the experience. I’ve been reading the local crime stats for a number of months now (doing some research on a future topic) and not once have I seen anyone caught stealing books from the library – in fact, I would probably applaud that unless they were looking for flammable material for their meth labs. I know have an assignment to check out some local college library hours. As always, thanks for taking the time to comment.
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