Is GoDaddy Extorting Customers Into Upgrading Their Hosting?
Have you received the email from GoDaddy with the subject: Alert: hosting account approaching resource limits?
If so, you may be a victim of GoDaddy’s scheme to get more money out of their customers without any real reason. At wpONcall, we are in the unique position of seeing the performance and support from a lot of different hosting providers. One common thread that keeps popping up is with our clients who use GoDaddy hosting. Almost every single one has received the following email:
The curious thing about this email is that it is coming to clients who have very simple websites and/or very low traffic. There is no reason they are using abnormal resources. Calling GoDaddy does not help either. They will simply say: It’s a WordPress site with plugins. There must be a plugin that is causing the spike in server usage.
Using GoDaddy’s own P3 plugin, you will be able to see what plugins are using the most resources, although it is not helpful in seeing the actual amount of server resources a particular plugin uses.
It is just our opinion, but it really does seem like this is a scheme to get more money out of customers by scaring them into thinking their site will not work with the limited resources. This conclusion comes as a combination of:
- The sites getting the warning are not resource or traffic intensive websites. They do not actually use many server resources at all.
- The close proximity in timing of all of these alert emails makes me think this is a marketing/strategic push by GoDaddy to make all of their customers upgrade their hosting for no valid reason.
- The ubiquitous nature of the warning; almost every client on GoDaddy has received this email.
All of these points make me think that there is something more going on than meets the eye. So what do you do if you get this email from GoDaddy? You have two choices: either upgrade your server resources at GoDaddy or change your host. Along with many other reasons, we recommend you change your host to one that will not extort money from you.
I just got this email. In what I’m sure is NOT a coincidence, my site is also using exactly 85% CPU and 490/512 memory. How is this not consumer fraud?
It’s a scam. I get this email a lot. The thing is my site’s not even live yet! It’s been in development for a couple of months and everytime I do some work on it i.e. upload a few images, I get the standard message of ‘85% CPU and 490/512’ etc. If I log into the control panel there is no usage spike and no traffic whatsover (apart from me). They appear to be emailing when when there is any relatively abnormal usage for that particular site. So in my case, there is zero traffic all week, but there is relatively unusual activity at the weekend (me when I do some work on the site at the weekend.)
This definitely constitutes misleading selling and in the UK/EU is considered fraud.
My customers are also getting a lot of these emails from GoDaddy. Even for websites that are still in development. This is definitely a ploy to get more money from customers, in a very dishonest way.
I have moved a lot of my customers away from GoDaddy because of this.
Godaddy worst
Thanks for this blog and others for their comments, this has to be a fraud, 100% godaddy scamming customers. As a 2019 update, they are still at it.
I was getting the “bogus” email all the time, for years, but site was always online, i have a site that sends me a notification of it ever goes down, anyway recently and very reluctantly upgraded to the next tier, OMG still get the email???????? all the time wtf?
Total scam, packing up moving to a serious hosting provider, if you can’t take your hosting serious, then why should i, bye goripoff.