After my last comparison review I must be in that type of mind sent because I’ve got another one for you today. You may have noticed my blog was down most of last week. At that time I was using RegisterFly.com as my host and domain registrar. I had been with them for a few years and never had any real trouble. From time to time portions of their site would be under contraction, but nothing to drastic. That was until last week when I found one morning that my site was not up. I proceeded to call RegisterFly and wait on hold for 30 minutes only to be told I would have to open a support ticket on their web site. Their website clearly states they have web, phone, and email support. Apparently phone support is only for issues that are not really technical. I opened a support ticket and noticed about 4 hours later my site was back up. I finally received a response about 36 hours later that said my site was back up. At the time I was hoping it was just a random fluke and it would not be a big deal. I was annoyed with the whole situation, especially since their site says the reply to tickets within 24 hours, but since my site was up I ignored it. I should not have. It was a sign of things to come.

The next morning my site was down again. I opened a ticked and called support anyway. The customer service rep did assign my ticked to the “Advanced” team and told me they would respond to the ticket after I waited 40 minutes on hold to get to him. After 2 days without a response I called back in (again waiting over 30 minutes) and was told that the ticket was in the Hosting Group to be addressed.

At this point I was pretty upset so I started looking around for a new hosting company. I found that GoDaddy.com has a hosting plan that offered twice as much storage for about half the price so I called them to get a few questions answered about how long the transfer would take and if I could get my website uploaded to the hosting server before the transfer completed. I had a rep on the phone with me within 2 minutes of calling GoDaddy. He was very helpful and actually walked me through the transfer process and knew the answers to all my questions without having to look them up. The transfer could take anywhere from 15 minutes to 5 days depending on how fast my current registrar was to respond. It took them 2 days to send me the administrative email confirming I wanted to transfer my domain away from RegisterFly.com. Within 5 minutes of my response to that email GoDaddy completed the transfer.

At this point I called GoDaddy to confirm what DNS Nameserver I should use since I already had my website uploaded and now the domain had transferred. The customer service rep answered within a minute and knew the nameserver off the top of his head. Within 20 minutes after completing the transfer my site was back up and running.

Yesterday I finally received a response to my ticket on RegisterFly. This is 2 days after I quit using them as my host and registrar and 6 days after I opened the ticket. The entire response was less than 2 sentences. It said that their server #18 was down and that they were working on it. I’m glad I did not wait for them to fix it or you would not be reading this post right now.

I’m pretty impressed with GoDaddy’s response times. I had a question that I did not need answered immediately so I emailed it instead of calling. Their support site lists right on it how long it would be before I can expect a response email. The site said it would be two hours. It came in about 90 minutes and was very well written.

I called today to cancel my hosting with RegisterFly and they told me (once again) that I need to do this by opening a ticke on their website. I would do that but their website is down. I noticed this while on the phone with their customer service rep. He said they were aware that it is down and it should be back up in 45 to 50 minutes. Do the seriously expect people to trust them to use their hosting services when they can’t keep their own website up?

GoDaddy wins in this comparison hands down. They have a faster web site. They actually answer the phone and their support techs don’t speak with an accent so strong I continually have to ask them to repeat themselves. The best part is the cost less and guarantee 99.9% uptime.