We had an issue this weekend with one of our high utilization servers at GoDaddy dropping dead. We’ve still not been completely briefed on what happened, but the end result was that our server was dead and we had to rebuild it from scratch. I learned a lot about what to expect from Godaddy’s disaster recovery process in the meantime and thought I’d share my experience.
The first thing that stuck out to me was that there was no notification that the server was dead. My partner actually discovered that there was a problem when she couldn’t access one of the sites on that server. She immediately called GoDaddy who then informed us that the server was dead. Maybe I am naive, but I would have expected that GoDaddy would be more on top of the situation and would alert us if they noticed a problem.
We had backed up all of the code running on our servers, but did not have recent backups of several of our databases. I fully admit that this was a glaring hole in our own process. GoDaddy knows that they have you over a barrell in this case so they charge you $150 to take the old drive off of your dead server and then hook it up through a USB enclosure. This allows you to get at your old data.
Not only is the cost extreme, but the process is really involved from the client perspective. From the minute we noticed the outtage, we really had to drive the GoDaddy service technicians to do everything. We had to initiate the reprovision and then we had to contact them about reconnecting our drive. We then had to get them to notify us when the old drive was reconnected. They were also very unhelpful when I asked them for assistance in mounting the usb drive.
In conclusion, the whole process has lead me to rethink my relationship with Godaddy. Their service technicians are extremely unhelpful, their hardware is flaky, and they’ll really take advantage of you when they see an opportunity. I believe that from this day forward, I’ll direct my clients who need hosting to have that hosting done with a different provider.
Have you had a similar situation? Feel free to post a comment and share your experience.