What to Do If You Cancel Your Godaddy WordPress Hosting Plan
You wake up one day and decide that you don’t want to run a WordPress site anymore. You’ve had enough, and you want a change. Maybe you’ve heard that Google is getting tough with web hosts that it feels are prioritizing commercial interest over customer satisfaction. You don’t want to be that host, so you look for an alternative.
You’ve been using GoDaddy for years, and decided it was time for a change. Or maybe you’ve tried out Bluehost and decided that their services are not what you’re looking for. You begin your search, and find GoDaddy’s competitor, Netlify. You read their website, and it seems great. They offer a free plan, that more than enough for you. You decide to give them a try.
The next day, you sign up for a free account on Netlify, and get to work building out your site. You do everything by the book. You add a header and footer, change the site’s background color, and add some text. You hit save, and…nothing happens.
You check your site’s performance on various tools like Google Analytics and AhoraBot, and everything seems good. You begin to wonder if something went wrong. It’s been a while since you last used FTP, the protocol that Netlify employs to transfer your website to the internet. You think to yourself, “I wonder if something is wrong? Am I forgetting something?” You search for help on their forums, and post a question about your FTP issue. After a few minutes, you get a response from someone named Mike. He says he’ll get back to you as soon as possible, and that’s the last you hear from them.
A few hours later, you get an email from Mike, thanking you for your patience and assuring you that your site is being looked into by a team member. He continues by saying that while he doesn’t know what the issue is yet, he’ll get back to you as soon as he does. You begin to wonder if this is some type of scam, or if something really is wrong.
The Case For Scam
Let’s dive into the facts here. When you signed up for the Netlify free trial, you received an email from them with a link to activate your account. After clicking the link, you were immediately put into an auto-renewal process, which you agreed to when you signed up. If you cancel during this time, they will charge you $13.95 per month for the privilege of having a website.
The email you received was from a disposable email address that changes every time you create a new account. You have no way of contacting Netlify to ask about the status of your account, and even if you did, there’s no guarantee that they would respond. The most you can hope for is that they might look at your issue and tell you that they’re working on it.
The case against a scam involves the fact that this is a well-designed and functional looking website. It has all the appearances of a reputable company. Some of the links on the site are activated immediately while you’re on the site, which gives the appearance of urgency to the call-to-action items like Get a free domain or Try Netlify free for 3 months. It’s easy to see how someone could be mislead into thinking that they’re dealing with a legitimate business, when, in fact, they could be the fraudsters.
The Case For Something Went Wrong
Let’s consider the alternative possibility that something went wrong, and Netlify is not at fault. You activated your account, and started building your site, and everything was going smoothly until…you hit a snag.
You get an error message when you try to save your site. It says that the page isn’t processing properly, and that you need to check your code and try again. You fix the issue, and continue to build out your site. You check it again, and find that the error message persists. You begin to get frustrated, and decide to give up on Netlify. You search for another host, and find that they don’t accept WordPress as a platform.
It’s at this point that you might begin to question whether or not you made the right decision in the first place, and start thinking about cancelling your account. If you were trying to build a business, you might consider paying for a premium plan to have a staging site until you can figure out what went wrong. Or, you can keep developing your site, and hope that you can get everything working correctly.
Even if you do figure out what the issue is, and Netlify doesn’t provide support for your particular situation, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to get your hosting plan reinstated. It all depends on whether or not they’ll have you back. If you’ve been frustrated enough, you might decide to just cancel your account and find a new host that does support WordPress. Or, you could decide to stick with Netlify, and see if they can help you out.
At the end of the day, you need to decide what’s most important to you. Is it the appearance of the website? Is it speed? Do you want to keep your existing domain, or do you want to purchase a new one? Once you’ve decided what’s most important to you, it’ll be easier to make a decision about what host to use.