Instead of Marketmoving.info’s 10th anniversary

Today would have been the 10th anniversary of my website, Marketmoving.info . I say “would have been” because the company that hosted my website for the past 10 years, GoDaddy , has hidden it since June this year and, by November 8, will delete it from its servers, despite my pleas for help. I am writing this personal account as a warning for small businesses and individual customers of the traps they can fall into when doing business with tech giants.

What follows is the story of a big company – GoDaddy – having the technical means to help a customer but choosing not to do so, in order to maximise its financial gain. It shows that companies with enough power and clout can, and will, extract the maximum amount of money from small customers, no matter how unpleasant the means by which they do this and even at the price of destroying years of their work and causing them easily avoidable distress.

I am writing this story to warn others about what they can expect from GoDaddy – and potentially other big hosting providers out there – but also in the hope of starting a wider debate on what can be done to prevent this kind of unequal balance of power in the future. I have a feeling that this kind of commercial abuse of power will only get worse if left unchecked. ?

My website did not have an SSL certificate, because on the hosting package I was on at GoDaddy it would have been too expensive for me to buy one (it was not included). As I wasn’t selling anything – marketmoving.info was a place where I wrote articles about business, economics, personal finance, and my favourite nerdy topic, central banks’ policies – I figured the website can carry on without the certificate.

And it did, until June 2023, when I suddenly noticed that my website was hidden. I called GoDaddy and they said they had decided to no longer show it because of the lack of the SSL certificate. They said that Google would penalise GoDaddy if it continued to show websites without SSL certificates. I explained I could not afford the certificate, and their representative said I could switch to a cheaper hosting deal, and get the certificate.

As my existing hosting package was still valid until October, I asked if the remaining four months could be ported into the new package, but was told no, I had to forego them. In other words, GoDaddy would make me pay for four months of hosting twice, under two different packages. I said I would wait to take a decision in October, as the existing package was due to expire on October 21.

At the beginning of October, I received an email from GoDaddy warning me that my existing annual hosting package – costing around ￡200 and without the SSL certificate option – would renew automatically. I logged in on October 8 and deleted the package, to avoid being charged. A week later, I purchased a cheaper one-year hosting plan, with SSL included. I tried to transfer my website to the new package, but found that my website was still hidden. I still had no way to access my files.

Ransom money?

When I called customer support, I was told that because I deleted my old package, I could no longer have access to my files. The only way the website could be restored, I was told, would be to buy the old package again and pay a restoration fee, which in total would have amounted to over ￡175. It felt very similar to a request for ransom.

What I should have done, they said, was to buy the new package first, transfer my files, and then delete the old one. To add insult to injury, they said the old package, an old Linux hosting plan that was scrapped, was no longer a working solution anyway. In other words, I would have to pay over ￡175 to recoup my files, and would still have to pay for the new hosting plan for my website to work.

The trouble is, I wasn’t aware that cancelling my old package would mean my website would be scrapped. I thought, if I cancel it before it expired (on October 21), I had plenty of time to transfer my files to the new plan. GoDaddy’s customer support said I had been warned when I deleted the package that my files would be lost, but I remember seeing no such warning.

However, they confirmed the files are still on their servers and will be there until November 8. They refused to simply help me recoup the files without paying for the old package. I do not want to do this, as I think it is profoundly unfair: it feels like my website is being held hostage.

Wider debate needed

To me, this proves very clearly that this company puts profits before its customers. Technically, it would be possible for GoDaddy to just transfer the files over to my new hosting package, but the company choses not to do it because it wants me to pay a big sum for something that I have already paid for.

I of course cancelled my new hosting package and asked for a refund, because I feel the company did not treat me as a human being, but as a mere source of cash. Even if I made a mistake and did not see the warning that deleting the old hosting package would delete my website, the fact that it can still restore it but chooses not to unless I pay this big sum makes me not want to be this company’s customer.

In the interests of transparency and fairness, I sent this account to GoDaddy to give it the right to reply, but nobody at the company responded to my repeated requests for comment.

On a wider point, it is very worrying that a big company feels it can treat customers like this. There seems to be no higher instance that can restore the balance of power, or at least I am unaware of one. On the surface, what GoDaddy is doing seems legitimate – it is up to them how they sell their products, right? But when you look at it from the small customer’s point of view, there is very little choice as to the customer’s options. We are squeezed for money, and there is nothing we can do.

With regret, I had to give up on the old files of my website, as I could not bring myself to pay what I regard as ransom money. Luckily, I kept most of the articles in Word format, so a record of sorts still exists. Marketmoving.info will relaunch when I find a hosting company that treats its customers fairly. If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know.

In the meanwhile, I would like to thank you all again for following me, reading my articles and commenting on them in the last decade.

Antonia Oprita