These days it seems like everyone wants to “guarantee” something. It’s easy to do, instills confidence in customers, and if properly executed, doesn’t leave you on the hook if you fall back on your word.
Before I proceed, let me be clear that I am not knocking GoDaddy as a company: I think they’re great most of the time. But the uptime guarantee is, well, not very comforting.
For starters, GoDaddy provides for the following recourse:
If Go Daddy fails to maintain this level of service availability, You may contact Go Daddy and request a credit of 5% of Your monthly hosting fee from Go Daddy for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from Go Daddy, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes.
Again, to be clear, they are not offering a 5% credit. They are offering you the opportunity to contact them to request a 5% credit. So what their guarantee boils down to is “we promise to keep your website up 99.9% of the time, and if we fail, we’ll let you contact us!” If they grant your request, you may be entitled to a 5% credit of your hosting fee. For the vast majority of GoDaddy customers who are on hosting plans that cost around $7/month, you’d be entitled to about $0.35, also known as the tax on a $5-footlong at Subway.
But GoDaddy doesn’t stop at simply offering a worthless guarantee: they also make it nearly impossible to cash in on. The following types of interruptions are excluded from coverage:
1) Anything caused by the customer (i.e. bad scripting), or any FTP/email outages that don’t affect front-end use. These are pretty reasonable.
2) Outages caused by scheduled maintenance or repairs that GoDaddy is making to their servers… kind of makes sense, though I’d really prefer to suffer downtime due to scheduled outages.
3) “Outages related to the reliability of certain programming environments,” or in other words, well I have no idea what they are talking about.
4) “Causes beyond the control of Go Daddy or that are not reasonably foreseeable by Go Daddy.” – In other words, if all else fails, it’s okay as long as GoDaddy didn’t see it coming.
So to recap, IF your website is not online 99.9% of the time, you are guaranteed permission to contact GoDaddy to ask for a 5% refund of one month’s hosting fee (aka $0.35). IF it wasn’t your fault, and IF it wasn’t because they blame something else for being unreliable, and IF it wasn’t because they were fixing something, and IF it wasn’t unforeseeable (aka if they knew an outage was coming but didn’t stop it), then MAYBE they’ll grant your request.
To top it all off, they conclude this section of their legal paperwork with a notice that “Total Service Uptime shall be solely determined by Go Daddy”. So in other words, good luck.