GoDaddy is a one-stop-shop for your basic website needs. You can buy your domain name, create your website and host it, all with GoDaddy. Or you can do just one or two of these. GoDaddy hosts more than 5 million websites and manages over 60 million domain names, making it one of the largest such companies around. Read our GoDaddy review below.
OverviewGoDaddy is an excellent choice for individuals who want to get a website up and running without too much effort, or want to host their already-created site. However, GoDaddy excels in the web hosting for businesses, whether they are using the website to tell potential clients of their offline commercial offerings or they are in the eCommerce arena.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs have a selection of web hosting packages to choose from and grow into.
Managed WordPress hosting will suit those who have or intend to create WordPress sites. GoDaddy identifies their primary business targets as Very Small Business Owners, having 5 or fewer employees.
What technical platforms are there to choose from?
GoDaddy offers both Linux and Windows web hosting, and you’re asked which one you want to use. Fortunately, there is a handy comparison chart that walks you through a short series of questions that ask how you’re building your site and then recommends which hosting account to use.
For beginners, the most important question is the last one which states “I have no idea what any of this means”, and then points you in the direction of Linux web hosting.
Is there room to grow?
GoDaddy offers room to grow for both the individual website owner and entrepreneurs and small businesses. There are three different website hosting plans, each varying in the number of websites supported and in the number of email addresses supplied.
WordPress site owners have a choice of four managed hosting plans which differ in the number of sites supported, the storage space available and in the maximum number of monthly visitors allowed in the cost of the plan.
Is it possible to get a refund?
You can request a refund from GoDaddy if you’re unsatisfied with their web hosting service. If you’ve signed up for the service on a month-to-month basis, you must ask for your money back within 48 hours of your purchase; those with annual contracts have 45 days to request for the refund. (After the 45 days, you’ll only get an in-store credit, pro-rated for the remainder of your contract.)
In both cases, you must give a reason you’re asking for the refund, and you must cancel the contract before GoDaddy will issue the refund.
What is GoDaddy’s reputation?
GoDaddy is one of the best known web services companies. Type “domain name registration” into any search engine and GoDaddy is one of the top entries to come up. GoDaddy is also famous for its Superbowl commercials. GoDaddy is best known for domain name registration and renewals, and the largest part of its revenue does come from these sources.
GoDaddy’s reputation as a service provider is mixed: industry experts rate the web hosting service higher than average but users post stories online of bad experiences with GoDaddy’s services and difficulties dealing with the company.
Is my website uptime guaranteed?
99.9% uptime is the guarantee per month given by GoDaddy – and this is fairly standard for the web hosting industry. But GoDaddy measures the uptime themselves and decides what qualifies as legitimate downtime.
If GoDaddy fails to meet this figure you’ll be entitled to a credit of 5% of your hosting fee for that month which you can apply to future purchases. But you have to contact GoDaddy and request this yourself.
Can GoDaddy look after my WordPress blog?
For your blogging convenience, GoDaddy provides Managed WordPress hosting. This makes it really easy to create and run a WordPress site, which has now become more than just a tool for blogging.
While it is possible to create your own WordPress site and run it on a regular web hosting platform, the sheer convenience of having GoDaddy look after the hosting setup and regular backups makes this option worth serious consideration. In addition, you can easily import an existing WordPress site into this hosting option.
Has GoDaddy won any awards?
GoDaddy has won awards for the best company at which to work, especially in Arizona, its home state. While it’s nice to know GoDaddy treats its employees well, this doesn’t mean a great deal for you as a customer.
GoDaddy has also won international Stevie Awards for Customer Service in 2014 and 2015. The Stevie Award recognizes the world’s top customer service, contact center, and sales efforts. However, entrants nominate themselves and pay an entrance fee.
Why should I choose GoDaddy web hosting?
Three reasons for choosing GoDaddy as your web hosting service are:
Key FeaturesEven the experts, who are usually skeptical of big companies that make big promises, give GoDaddy an excellent rating. The first thing critics will mention about GoDaddy is the excellent uptime. Users will rarely experience any technical problems or downtime. This is an absolute must for businesses. What is really special about GoDaddy is that they are able to offer such superior service for a great price.
Contrary to some user reviews, experts also give GoDaddy high praise when it comes to customer service. GoDaddy offers 24/7 support and the critics found that it was easy to get into contact with an actual person and that they were able to quickly get helpful answers to pressing questions.
Ultimately, GoDaddy comes highly recommended by the experts. There is room for improvement when it comes to WordPress integration and email features, but GoDaddy is helping to set the standard for hosting services.
While GoDaddy clearly has some unhappy customers, they are still the world’s largest domain registrar and boasts over 13 million paying customers. Based on those statistics alone they can’t be all that bad.Most of the complaints against GoDaddy have to do with their website building and eCommerce tools,but when it comes to web hosting, you can’t do much better than GoDaddy. Users report very little downtime and excellent security. From a technical perspective, users couldn’t be more pleased with the performance and reliability of GoDaddy’s hosting services.
In addition, GoDaddy offers a great value. Satisfied customers are impressed with the number of features and quality of service they are able to enjoy for just a few dollars a month.
GoDaddy is probably one of the most recognizable names in web hosting, yet their consumer reviews are less than glowing. It seems that the company may be better at advertising than actually providing excellent service. Overall, users gave GoDaddy an average of 3 out of 5 stars. The vast majority of users awarded GoDaddy the lowest scores when it came to customer support. Many users reported having trouble getting ahold of representatives over the phone. Those who submitted support tickets found that they quickly received a reply and acknowledgement of their problem, but that the company often took several days to actually address the real issue. Unhappy customers felt like they were lured in by strong marketing only to find GoDaddy didn’t deliver on promises.
Reliability & UptimeGoDaddy states that they have a guaranteed 99.9% uptime – that is, your website will be available to anyone who wants to browse it for a minimum of 99.9% of the time in any given month. This sound impressive and, putting it in context, many other web hosting companies offer the same guarantee.
What is 99.9% uptime?
But what does this 99.9% uptime actually mean? Reading the fine print of the guarantee, you find that downtime caused by scheduled maintenance, your third-party apps that don’t work and things that affect only your website email don’t count towards the .01% allowable downtime. So, your website could be available for less than 99.9% of the time and the guarantee would still be met.
Does GoDaddy hit the 99.9% mark?
Given all this, you have to ask whether GoDaddy does meet the 99.9% uptime mark. And this is where it gets hazy. There’s no info about this on the GoDaddy website, so you have to rely for the scoop on third-party groups and reviews, and people who tell of their experiences with this in online forums.
There are mixed reviews about GoDaddy’s uptime. Some call it stable, dependable and rock-solid. Others complain about the many times when their website wasn’t available. Measurement figures indicate that GoDaddy’s uptime does come in on average between 98 – 99.9%, though some months it could be as low as around 97%.
Speed is important too
Speed is another consideration. It’s no good having your website available 24/7 if it takes forever to load – people just don’t wait around. GoDaddy ranks highly for speed in measurement tests, but stories from users are mixed, ranging from tales of very slow speeds to people who are very satisfied with how fast their website appears.
Some complaints mention that Google crams its shared servers with all kinds of websites, slowing down everyone’s loading time.
If you’re concerned with the speed of your website loading, then consider GoDaddy’s Virtual Private Server, Dedicated server or Cloud server hosting options. These give you your own, virtual or physical, server space.
There’s a large variety of plans with each of these, providing various amounts of RAM, storage space and data transfer allowances. Each hosting plan is available on Linux or Windows platforms but doesn’t include emails
Features & Tools If you choose the Linux web hosting option, you access and control everything through the customized cPanel.Items are identified by icons and are grouped handily together – domains, databases, mail, files, security and so on. You change your preferences here too.
Down the left-hand side of the cPanel are bar graphs showing your site’s statistics. These include information about all kinds of usage, including physical memory, disk space, and CPU, and data about the processes you have.
Those who choose Windows web hosting use the standard Odin Plesk control panel. This offers a clean and streamlined interface, with icons and text, that looks like a regular Windows screen.
The disk space and bandwidth you are allotted depend on the web hosting package you sign up for. You’ll have either a set amount or “unlimited” – see the section on Pricing for an explanation of this. In Linux hosting you can use the bar graphs mentioned above to keep track of how much of each you are using.
The number of email accounts also provided vary with the plan you select.
Annual (and longer) subscriptions to any web hosting plan come with one free domain name for the length of the initial contract. Once again, the plan you choose determines how many websites you can run on the hosting plan. And speaking of websites, you can, of course, bring across your existing website or create a new one from scratch using GoDaddy’s Website Builder for an additional monthly fee.
If you want to use WordPress on your site, GoDaddy provides managed WordPress hosting. You can create a WordPress site in the GoDaddy environment or bring your existing WordPress with you.
Each Windows web hosting plan provides some MySQL and MSSQL databases, from 10 and one respectively with the Economy plan to an unlimited number of each (though with storage size restrictions) in the Ultimate plan. Database backup and restore is included in all the Windows hosting plans.
Site backups and restores are extra to all of the web hosting plans. For a monthly fee, you receive automatic daily backup with encrypted data transfer and storage with a set amount of data storage available for your sites. Additional storage is available for an extra cost.
All website hosting servers use Solid State Drives (SSDs).
Both the Linux and the Windows web hosting plans make it easy to install apps with 1-click install. The Linux plans over 125 free apps and Windows hosting gives you access to over 50 free apps. However, GoDaddy does not provide a list of all the free apps that you get. The few mentioned on the website include WordPress PHP and Drupal. Both Linux and Windows hosting options also provide the 1-click set-up for GoDaddy registered domains.
If you’re considering opening up shop online, you’ll be interested in GoDaddy’s eCommerce options. For a monthly subscription, GoDaddy bundles together a website, hosting and shopping cart. You can sell unlimited products, offer your coupons and open a store on Facebook. GoDaddy uses Quick Shopping Cart, their proprietary shopping cart software.
GoDaddy removes the worry of malware by offering an add-on of SiteLock security. For an extra monthly fee, your websites are scanned daily and any malware found is automatically removed.
Various levels of SiteLock are available, depending on whether you have a personal, business or ecommerce website. You can provide peace of mind to your visitors for sensitive data they enter into your sites, such as passwords and credit-card numbers, through purchasing, again at an extra monthly cost, an SSL-certificate.
If you’re considering opening up shop online, you’ll be interested in GoDaddy’s eCommerce options. For a monthly subscription, GoDaddy bundles together a website, hosting and shopping cart. You can sell unlimited products, offer your coupons and open a store on Facebook.
Both the Linux and the Windows web hosting plans make it easy to install apps with 1-click install. The Linux plans over 125 free apps and Windows hosting gives you access to over 50 free apps. Both options also provide the 1-click set-up for GoDaddy registered domains.
If you need your website to be up and running 24/7, you can subscribe to GoDaddy’s Premium DNS service. For a monthly fee, you’re guaranteed 99.999% uptime for unlimited websites. This service also protects your sites from hackers who might attack you by redirecting your visitors to a malicious website.
Hands-on developers who work with CGI scripts should note that only the Deluxe and Premium Linux plans support CGI, with PERL, PHP, and Python. Ruby and Java are no longer supported.
Plans & Pricing Linux hosting plans
GoDaddy offers three Linux plans for web hosting, each of which seem to be constantly on sale, at least for when you initially sign up. We’ll talk about the price later as it’s worth a detailed discussion. Right now, here’s the details of what you get with each plan. Note that with each plan you receive a free domain name as long as you sign up for at least one year.
The Economy plan is an essential one and lets you host just one website, which is what most beginners have. You get 100Gb of storage and unlimited bandwidth (more on this later), and 100 email addresses This plan is a good choice to get for beginners; however, if you feel that you’ll soon outgrow just one website, take a look at the Deluxe plan.
With GoDaddy you have either one website or an unlimited number, as shown by the next level of plan, the Deluxe. Unlimited sites, storage, and bandwidth give you room to grow as do the 500 email addresses.
Businesses will be interested in the Ultimate plan, also with unlimited storage, bandwidth and websites. The free email addresses are now at 1,000 and you get twice the processing power and memory.
Premium DNS ensures that your website is safe and always online and the Ultimate package also comes with a 1-year SSL certificate (but with some restrictions.)
Windows plans are similar
The Windows web hosting plans are similar but include SQL and MSSQL databases in varied numbers depending on the plan and also allow for FTP users. The free domain name with a twelve month or more subscription applies here too,
The fine print about “unlimited.”
Before we get to pricing, a word about the unlimited bandwidth and storage. GoDaddy is upfront about saying that unlimited is only unlimited as long as it complies with their Hosting Agreement. If you hog either the bandwidth or storage and it starts to pose a threat to the operation of GoDaddy’s servers, they’ll notify you by email; you will then either have to upgrade to a different type of server or cut your usage down. To be fair, all web hosting services have this provision in their terms of use.
Now to pricing
GoDaddy offers a special introductory price for the first web hosting term you subscribe to; after this, the regular price kicks in. The choice of term runs from three months to 36 months, for the Economy plan, and 1 month to 36 months for the other two plans.
So, if you sign up for three months at the intro price, your next three month term will be charged at the regular price, whatever that is at the time of renewal. The cost per month decreases the longer the term you sign up for.
Bumping up to regular pricing also holds if you’ve received a free domain with your term of 12 or more months. The free domain is just for the initial term and you’ll be charged the current annual domain renewal rate at the end of your first web hosting purchase term.
Extras you can buy include site backup and restore, SiteLock protection to scan your sites every day against malware and standard SSL certification to protect sensitive data such as passwords.
Managed WordPress hosting plan
If you’re thinking of hosting a WordPress site, you have a choice of four Managed WordPress hosting plans. These, again, come with an introductory price which switches to full price after the initial period, and you have a choice from one month to 36 months.
The plans vary between 1 and five websites, the amount of storage (which has to be spread among all your websites) and the number of monthly visitors allowed. The Basic plan is a good starter plan for personal blogs and websites, allowing for one site and 25,000 visitors per month.
The other three plans are more geared towards businesses with an integrated SEO wizard, 100,000 and upwards monthly visits allowed and a 1-click staging site.
All the managed WordPress plans include access to free themes and plugins, free daily backups and 1-click restore, and interactive WordPress walkthroughs and training videos.
Changing your plan
With GoDaddy, once you’ve signed up for a particular plan, you can make changes to the length of the plan or upgrade to another plan before the end of the original term. However, the full cost of the plan you change to kicks in – you don’t receive a promo price twice.
Customer Support GoDaddy removed its ticketing and email support for U.S. customers at the end of April 2014. This leaves you with the option of phoning them or using their live chat facility if you need to get help and want to have direct contact with a person.
Phone and chat support are available 24/7. Phone and chat support are available 24/7. All support personnel are located in Arizona and Iowa, United States.
Contacting the support team
On the top right of each screen of the GoDaddy website is a phone number offering 24/7 phone support.
At the bottom of the main Help screen is a button labeled “Chat with Us!”, letting you talk to a live person. In addition, periodically around the website, especially when you’re accessing the sales pages, the chat window pops up to encourage you to talk to a support person.
The chat function informs you when there’s a high volume of users and gives you a phone number to call for immediate help.
The quality of the advice given through both these mediums is generally high, though there are, as always, complaints from people who have been given inaccurate, incomplete or totally wrong information.
The kinds of queries that seem to be successfully answered are relatively simple and straightforward ones; complex problems, such as a person’s site being down with visitors receiving a “Website not available” message are not suited to be answered in real-time on the phone, let alone in a live chat.
Knowledge bases
The help section of the GoDaddy website offers articles on both Linux and Windows hosting. Under these are, variously, details on getting started, email, setting up applications, managing files, and troubleshooting and security. There’s a search function on the Knowledgebase.
GoDaddy provides video tutorials on its website for WordPress users. Otherwise, some short video tutorials on other topics are available on YouTube.
You’ll need to search on GoDaddy and page through the customer stories and advertisements, but there’s some useful information there. Don’t dismiss the videos provided by users of GoDaddy; these are people who have been there and made it work and they’re willing to tell you how.
There is no support forum though GoDaddy does provide a space for you to leave suggestions for improvements to its products and services.
Ease of Use There is cPanel for Linux users
Your first indication that GoDaddy has designed their own version of the industry standard cPanel is the customized color scheme to match the GoDaddy look-and-feel.
GoDaddy’s cPanel is clean and well-laid out, making it easy to navigate to find what you need. The custom icons on the cPanel make sense and fit in with the styling of the GoDaddy site in general.
Buying web hosting
It’s easy to buy web hosting from GoDaddy: just click on the Hosting tab in the menu on the top of the main page and select the hosting you’re interested in. The default screen you see shows the plans for Linux hosting which most people purchase. From then on, it’s a matter of choosing your plan, a length of subscription, any security add-ons, entering your free domain name, avoiding all the other upsell items and giving your credit card details.
People have warned that it’s important to check your shopping cart before you pay as sometimes items have appeared there that have not been ordered.
Managing your web space
Both the cPanel for Linux hosting users and the Plesk control panel for Windows hosting users have clean interfaces and are icon driven.
Users report that they’re easy to use and to navigate. The bar graphs in the Linux cPanel clearly depict the amount of resources being used and the file manager, domain manager and file manager make it easy to keep control of your web presence.
Creating or expanding your website
GoDaddy’s Web Builder is a relatively basic website builder that provides the tools to create a serviceable website for those who are not necessarily technically inclined.
The 1-click installation of the free web apps is a plus point that makes expanding the functionality of your site a snap
Conclusion GoDaddy is a strong competitor in the web hosting field. Its plans and services fall in the middle of the pack – there’s nothing too fancy about them but they offer what the beginner website builder and very small business owner needs, and that’s who GoDaddy markets to.
You can bring in your own website or create a new one using the Website Builder tool or WordPress option. GoDaddy’s uptime is steady and reliable.
Aside from the web hosting fee, most everything else has an additional fee, monthly or otherwise, and the GoDaddy site is quite forceful is trying to get you to buy add-ons or to upgrade.
GoDaddy’s web hosting service gets mixed reviews; there are expert reviews of a high uptime record but on the other hand, users report extensive downtime and many “website not available” problems.
Customer service is another consideration: you can only phone or use live chat to interact with the customer support team. Users report that the response time of these support channels is usually quite fast though the content of some answers has not always been accurate.
Check out GoDaddy for your starter personal or small business website but keep in mind that it’s a large company, and your dealings with them may not always go smoothly.
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