As a professional affiliate, I deal with many hosting companies. On top of that, I operated a brick and mortar hosting company for nearly 10 years prior to become an affiliate. In other words I know this field very well. I have many dedicated and virtual private server (VPS) servers. In some case, I have a spare VPS just to always have one ready and frankly I sort of enjoy comparing hosting firms.
Six months ago, I ordered a VPS from Godaddy.com with no real need aside from some of my foreign consultants being able to surf the web from the US. After a few months, I realized they were not even using that server, since Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) was too slow from their location (Southern Asia). We decided to get more serious with that server and make it a proxy server, so they could see the web as if in the USA. We had realized, with concern, that one popular site was blocking our server because they had been subject to abuse from the IP range our server was on. They had classified our server and the neighboring servers as hacker/spammer.
I decided to ask Go Daddy to change the IP of this server to a new range to avoid this server being tagged as a “spammer/hacker” computer. Their support is poor. After 30 minutes waiting on the phone I was told that chat was the best way to get support for dedicated servers as the chat people had actual access to the machines. After 30 minutes waiting on chat, the support person told me that I should not spam or hack other sites from their server (what!?!). I told him that this is not part of my activities and that he could check the logs/traffic to verify. This server had been used a handful of times in 6 months. He replied that they can’t change the IP and advised I order a new server (hoping that new ip would be clean?). First, changing the IP of a server is an extremely simple task. The fact that they say it is not possible to change a servers IP is concerning. Is their pool of IPs so polluted that they simply cannot let customers change their IPs to a clean one? Or are they running out of clean IPs? Which raises another question, is Go Daddy one of those spammer/hacker friendly hosting firms? My advise is to stay away from this type of support and attitude. There are too many good hosting firms out there. Also never host with a firm that plays dumb with the concept of a polluted IP and let you deal with it when you did nothing wrong. A porn, hacker or spammer site running from a given IP, for years, will pollute that ip and maybe even the ips around it (the entire c class1.1.1.x) over time.
I’m not certain but in any case it was very easy to cancel (no wait time) with Godaddy and they even gave me a refund on the pre-paid yearly payment I had made. Now I’m testing out a 1&1 VPS…
