I just finished working on a couple of projects that used GoDaddy as their hosting provider.  Please note the past tense.  GoDaddy is the most worthless hosting provider ever.  Not that their actual service is bad once the site is up, they appear to have plenty of hardware and bandwidth, but the getting the site up part is where they fall on their stupid faces.  Instead of using the industry standard cPanel GoDaddy decided to roll their own administration panel and incorporate it into their website.  I’m not against people trying their own thing, variety is the spice of life as it were, but reinventing the wheel by adding 18 different advertisements and making it oval is a pretty stupid idea. 

So let’s assume you have navigated the GoDaddy crap maze and found the area that allows you to create an ftp account.  Hooray!  You think you’ve won, but in fact GoDaddy has spat in your cereal and definitely not for the last time.  For some reason the completely automatable task of ftp account creation takes 30 minutes.  Why should something simple like FTP account creation take longer than say 5 seconds?  My guess is that the IT guys have been tasked with figuring out how to make bowel movements a sellable add-on and are too busy to work on trivial things like FTP account creation.

Thank goodness, FTP is finally set up, we have a bowel movement added to our shopping cart and we can start making our website.  Oh noz!  We forgot about the database we need to keep track of the number of kittens I kill while waiting for FTP accounts to setup.  But really, how difficult could it be to setup a database?  Assuming you can find the link to the database setup page you are required to create another user name and password pair for logging in to the database setup.  Once that’s done you can count on another 30 minutes to create the database and users.  Cheers GD!

Database is setup, we have FTP access, and finally we are able to get our site up and running!  Hahaha, nope.  GoDaddy doesn’t have access to some common PHP packages like Archive_Tar or the PHP FTP commands (those are the two that I know of for sure, I’m guessing there are probably lots of others).  Of course the fact that these packages are missing isn’t documented anywhere on their website so you get a silent fail and you have no idea why.  Not to mention that you can’t create folders outside of the web root, or change the web root location at all for that matter.  GoDaddy is a gigantic sore on the internet’s butt.  However, I did spend tons of time on their phone support line and never had a bad experience, so kudos on your support GoDaddy otherwise kindly go away.