Whenever I encounter issues with a hosting provider, I make sure to share the experience here, as was done with my experience with the bad MediaTemple GridServers. This post is dedicated to a gripe with GoDaddy Economy hosting accounts that were purchased a couple years ago.

GoDaddy now offers cPanel as a free addon to those who purchase any type of Linux hosting from GoDaddy. This includes their cheap Economy Hosting package. What if you wanted in on this free cPanel action? You should be able to get it too, right?

Wrong. GoDaddy does not allow existing users to get cPanel without purchasing a cPanel Account.

What if you offer to upgrade to a better hosting package — such as the Deluxe package?

Their answer was still a big fat “no”.

This may seem like a tiny issue to some, and at such a low monthly price some of you may be thinking “You have no right to complain! Purchase a new account instead!” — but to me, these types of stories are worth sharing. Many hosting providers do not give much (if any) support to legacy accounts. I’ve had trouble in particular with Verio, which refuses to help if your account is old and tells you to do their paid support because of that or to get a new account and pay for migration (all at large fees). Verio may be in my next post, in fact, as I am having the displeasure of dealing with them again.

Other than this, I’ve had only one other problem with GoDaddy. They had deleted some files without permission when a support request was put in and never told me about it, which was a pretty large mistake on their part.

Keep in mind that this has just been my experience as of 11/22/2013. Whether or not things will change with GoDaddy down the line is to be seen (hopefully not by me, but others).