GoDaddy is Injecting Site-Breaking JavaScript Into Customer Websites (techrepublic.com)

Web hosting service GoDaddy is injecting JavaScript into customer websites that could impact the overall performance of the website or even render it inoperable, according to Australian programmer Igor Kromin. From a report: GoDaddy's analytics system is based on W3C Navigation Timing, but the company's practice of unilaterally opting in paying customers to an analytics service -- tracking the visitors to websites hosted on GoDaddy services -- without forewarning is deserving of criticism. GoDaddy claims the technology, which it calls "Real User Metrics" (RUM), "[allows] us to identify internal bottlenecks and optimization opportunities by inserting a small snippet of javascript code into customer websites," that will "measure and track the performance of your website, and collects information such as connection time and page load time," adding that the script does not collect user information. The script name "Real User Metrics" is somewhat at odds with that claim; likewise, GoDaddy provides no definition of "user information."

GoDaddy claims "most customers won't experience issues when opted-in to RUM, but the JavaScript used may cause issues including slower site performance, or a broken/inoperable website," particularly for users of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and websites with pages containing multiple ending tags.

Comments

I was wondering why my website on GoDaddy was slow

[ITRambo]

Damn them. No company should inject code into any website that customer actually pay for. If they want to host for free, that's another story. And yeah. My website is a lot slower than it was. I thought it was my ISP, but the speeds are in spec. Transferring a complex website is a real time consuming PITA. I'll do it anyway, if they break my site.

Re:What's in a Name?

[mick232]

The term RUM is a pretty standard term in the application performance monitoring industry. And yes, it refers to the fact that performance data of real users is collected instead of synthetic tests.

Re:Well then...

[bobbied]

... might be time to move all my domains to another company.

My friend who was a GoDaddy customer for over a decade did just that a month ago. Mainly because they kept black holing his domains because of THEIR code change.

He ran a business, and the website going down was a BAD thing for him. After nearly a decade of running on this hosting service, having not made any changes to his website for over 3 months all of a sudden GoDaddy TOSed him for excessive CPU usage, "No you may not access any of your data thank you". A day on the phone later, they restore him after he pleads with their customer support and appeals to his long record of service. He decides to make a backup of everything now, bad call, he gets TOSed again the next day, this time they won't restore him.

He got to looking at his backups and notices that what happened was GoDaddy CHANGED their backup processes and modified his system by applying patches. Anytime he ran backups, the CPU usage would spike. So, because he had subscribed to GoDaddy's backup service AND then dared to actually run a backup manually the bug they installed caused them to TOS him.

He's not on GoDaddy now, after decades of trouble free service. Their loss..