Combining the forces of GoDaddy and Drupal? Mind your credit card bill
Story byMircea Goia
Mircea Goia was born in Romania and emigrated to US in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. His is involved in several(show all)Mircea Goia was born in Romania and emigrated to US in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. His is involved in several online projects and one of them isMyTestBox.com. Mircea shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, e-commerce, online video (and filmmaking). He can be reached onhis personal website(for suggestions, news, tips).
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Fishy deal
Mihai has only three blogs hosted on his Deluxe shared account and paid for a year of hosting in advance. This specific GoDaddy account has a storage limit of 150 GB. He got a warning that he exceeded the quota so deleted some unnecessary files. Then, after a while, BAM! He got that email from GoDaddy.
Of course he tried to find out why he owes that money. GoDaddy wouldn’t tell him. Instead they just blocked his account this weekend without any notice. When he asked which files or folders were so big GoDaddy customer service responded “Sorry sir, but the account is blocked and I cannot tell you about the files”. Isn’t that ironic? Catch 22.
After more talks GoDaddy offered him a “deal”: “$800 for your data, and buy the next hosting plan and we’ll forget about the $7000, even though you technically owe us this money”. Doesn’t this sounds quite.., fishy? They don’t explain WHY they ask that money, they just asked for it. It’s not hard to imagine how pissed off Mihai was. He eventually paid that $800.
Mihai wasn’t the only one
Those who think this is an isolated case are wrong. Adam Fendelman, hostsHollywoodChicagoon GoDaddy, was also confronted with a rather impressive bill last month. Adam presumably owed GoDaddy $6,600, thanks to the very same software bug (a third-party Drupal module) that made Mihai’s bill skyrocket. Once again, GoDaddy was “kind enough” to only ask a part of the bill. Adam’s case was settled with 969 dollars.
In comes The Huffington Post
Adam was smart enough to enable the power of the blogosphere and wrote a post about his “GoDaddy adventure” forHuffington Post. Soon enough, a GoDaddy big shot called Adam to say he would get the $969 back (this experience was also translated into a Huffington Postarticle
So GoDaddy only listen to you when you’re an influential blogger. Just so you know. Adam was kind enough to write anarticle about Mihaias well, and guess what: Mihai received a call from GoDaddy today. They refunded his money and moved him on the Unlimited plan
GoDaddy will resolve the problem and will try to implement a notification system for who is exceeding the disk quota so clients can take early measures. This was the core issue: GoDaddy didn’t have a early alert system for quota exceeding and wasn’t very flexible – at first – when the user wasn’t to blame.
