Sometimes You Get What You Pay For

Morning Musing on Walking Away from The Big Guys

Luvlies, not good morning but good afternoon! I have spent the better part of the day trying to clean up, and deal with the mistakes that GoDaddy made with my dedicated servers from years ago. ** If you’re not interested in tech schtuff, head over to the July reading list review **.

A smidgen of a back story is needed:

I managed my host servers with MediaTemple for almost 15 years, when GorDy (that’s what we’re calling them now) came in a fc*ked a good situation up. They bought the company but wouldn’t update the php for servers on MT’s platform, which left everyone’s sites vulnerable to predators.

My sites were hacked, and hacked AGAIN repeated, because GorDy wanted me to pay hundreds of dollars per month for site security, until I upgraded to a more expensive package. I fought for as long as I could, because I wasn’t going to be coerced into an agreement that didn’t work for me.

In 2023, after thousands of dollars were spent to ‘resolve’ my server issues, I was forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to GorDy to transfer sites to a secure host server. I was livid because they still managed to mess up the transfer; data was lost, and they made me pay them more $$ to get it back.

After being locked out of my sites off and on for another year – hackers kept getting onto GorDy servers – I needed to find a solution. For the SMB owner, when you’re hacked, they get into everything: your cards, your phone, your 13 year old facebook pages, your domains, food delivery accounts, EVERYTHING. Also, Goog-less punishes you for having problematic sites (as they should), so the sites rank lower. It’s really hell on earth for the little guy. But dealing with the big guys, and knowing they’re the ones behind the mess, is even more unnerving.

A year goes by after the transfer fiasco to GorDy servers, when I was watching a respected youtuber chatting about the different servers you can use for hosting websites. She mentioned in passing a company called BigScoots. Said that they are ‘expensive but absolutely worth it’.

Sweetie say less.

I called them, signed up that day, and they handled everything else for me. They transferred all of it, removed the bugs and all problematic junk code created by GorDy’s team on the backend, all within 12H.

Done… I didn’t have to lift a finger.

And everything has been running smoothly since.

This is not a sponsored or incentivized post. I’m sharing the tools I use to run my business, which could be helpful for those who want a frictionless experience when it comes to technology. I’m just gonna say it: BigScoots is the reason I started creating again. My sites are faster, safer, and my clients are happy. The level of service provided by BigScootie-Patootie is leaps and bounds ahead of the failing death star that is GorDy.

It’s been two years, and today was the last day of my 3yr contract with GorDy. It took me an hour to close out my account, because they were trying to make this transition as difficult as possible. The rep was lying, gaslighting, trying to put the onus on me for any issues that occurred.

I ignored it.

I just pressed a couple of buttons, and BigScoots handled everything.

So, yes. I’m paying more to be on a different smaller hosting server, but my nervous system is regulated, and I finally feel like I’m getting what I pay for.