Make an Author’s website – just don’t use GoDaddy

It’s a wonderful idea for an author to have a website to promote their book. If you have a single book a page with the title of the book in the url of the website it’s a great thing (www.mygreatnovel.com), if you plan to or have multiple titles you may want to use the author’s name as the url (provided it is available. God help you if your name is John Smith. Maybe use a pseudonym). Link your website to your social media like Facebook and start promoting yourself. Now, perhaps you’ll work with a designer who will handle setting up the hosting for you and not have to determine where that should go. Maybe you’ll use a free wordpress site rather than one you host yourself (see wordpress.com).

Ok but that’s not the topic of this post. This post is a cautionary tale of sorts for those of us who have dealt with GoDaddy as a place to host our websites.

How can I say this? Um….they suck.

They are more expensive in the long term. The wait time for tech support is often incredibly long. Their billing and upselling could best be described as predatory. Nowadays you need to make your site https (secure) rather than http. All lot of other hosting companies include this in the cost of a hosting plan. Godaddy charges extra. About $70 for one site, twice that for multiple sites. If that weren’t bad enough on anything other than a primary site you have to set it up yourself, and they don’t make it clear how to do so, because at times you get thru to a tech support person is ill trained and has no idea what to do. They often will email you an article about how to do something for yourself that is outdated and no longer relevant.

Not to ramble on but (we have heard so many stories), if you’re new to this and are setting up a site on your own, for the love of God stay clear of them.Make sure when you do pick a hosting company they have 24/7 tech support so if your site goes down at 3am on a Sunday there’s someone to call.

This is a decent article about alternatives: