GoDaddy’s customer service has really gone down the drain since I first went there. I only went with them in the first place since it was recommended by a professor I knew, and there’s a few things I never liked about it. For instance, why does a domain name registrar have spokesbabes? It seems kind of low brow, and as a man it feels demeaning. Another major problem I have with their site is the UI is a gorram cluster fudge; I’m trying to keep my site family friendly, but you get my meaning. And then there’s the automatic renewals that you don’t know exist until they’ve already charged your account.

Dreamhost is a lot better. Since it’s just hosting I can’t install my own software, but that wasn’t something I did a lot of anyway. It’s also a lot cheaper. I had multiple hosting accounts with GoDaddy and switched to a VDS since it was cheaper to put all my sites on there. At Dreamhost though, you can host multiple sites on one hosting plan. My GoDaddy VDS cost over $300 a year, but Dreamhost only costs me about $70 per year (I got $50 off with the coupon code “50Bones”). Network speed for Dreamhost appears to be faster too.

Also, Dreamhost offers free privacy when you register domains. At GoDaddy I had to pay about $13 per year per domain for that service.