The reasons not to use GoDaddy in the past have been entirely moral/political, not technical. I've been using them for 10 years without a DNS issue like this, so it's not quite the same thing.
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.
It is slightly misleading (since the default search box is for .com), but all it says is "DOMAINS FROM 3.99"
which is absolutely true. Some .info domains go for as low as $3.99
That is nowhere near as bad as GoDaddy's upselling crap PLUS namecheap's configuration and control panels are really nice to use.
Comparing GoDaddy to NameCheap is like comparing MySpace (before the last major redesign) to Facebook. They both have to make money somehow (and so have certain lame tactics to be competitive), but NameCheap is obviously lightyears beyond godaddy in any informed persons mind (ESPECIALLY when actually using the service after having paid for it... NameCheap's control panels are the best i've ever seen anywhere)
You really think they'd resort to deception for an extra 50 cents per month? Ignorance before malice.
Check this out for real-time query speed testing: http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest
(And yeah, looks like GoDaddy is a solid "Test failed" still...)
Funny note after running the test a few times--the worst performing provider is the one whose salespeople contact me the most...
Their UI is there to provide one purpose, confuse user's into buying stuff. It seems to have worked for the most part.
I think we just need to remember that most people reading HN is not the target audience GoDaddy is looking for (IMO).
I would call that a technical issue, even though it probably only affects web crawlers.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2964084 2: http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts.htm
So, now what do we switch to?
- No Up-sells - Simple intuitive clean powerful UI - Pricing transparency - Security - Innovative management tools for handling larger domain portfolios
DNS functionality will be rolled out in the coming month.
But I've also been migrating my domains away from GoDaddy for purely technical reasons.
One is that the UI is constantly changing, with its sole goal to be deliberately counterintuitive. There are key places where it tells you click on a link, without just offering the link right there, so you have to hunt it down on the page. Crazy.
But the worst one is that I can no longer read their emails in mutt. At all. It was refreshing to get simple notifications from Namecheap that were short and easy to read.
The problem was, the malware was only visible when the referrer was "Google", so they claimed there was nothing wrong. For weeks.
Either way, when it came down to it, one of their other shared clients were compromised and their sandboxing was rather insufficient leading to most of the clients on that box having some sort of malware installed. I'm sure the person in question was targeted because it looked like a standard install and frankly, if I was targeting shared hosting providers, I'd create my malware to be easy to integrate with WordPress.
I hope that makes it more clear why I find it to be GoDaddy's fault. In the end of the day, they understood what was wrong, apologized and fixed it.
Even so, you never answered my original question. How'd you determine it was a sandboxing problem rather than your own WordPress installation being compromised? Seems even less so considering you didn't realize you had to update WordPress yourself.
They. Told. Me. It. Was. Their. Fault.