Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.
If you or your business is ready to go live, it's time to choose the right web hosting service.
GoDaddy is a well known brand when it comes to registering domain names, this company is also well suited for personal and business hosting purposes, they have built a highly reliable server infrastructure and are equipped with first class customer service. .
What is GoDaddy
View Details
For most people, GoDaddy doesn't need an introduction, and many people register their first domain name here.
Founded in 1997 as Jomax Technologies, the company originated in Baltimore, Maryland, and later relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona, which is also now home to its headquarters.
A few years before founding GoDaddy, Bob Parsons also founded another company and sold it to Intuit for $65 million, and just in 2017, according to Wikipedia, they generated a staggering $2.23 billion in revenue. GoDaddy is reportedly now the largest domain name registrar in the world, with over 6,000 employees serving over 17 million customers.
So, they did a good job.
But the real story is that business size doesn't always matter most. Many of the big brands we tested got the worst results, with more money, more employees, and more servers, but poor overall performance.
Does GoDaddy do the same? Are they making the same mistakes as other well-known brands? Or were they able to solve some of the problems encountered by their competitors?
We purchased shared hosting from GoDaddy in 2017 and then built a WordPress site to evaluate their performance, what follows depends largely on the test data we were given.
Benefits of GoDaddy
GoDaddy has lots and lots of money, they have been in the industry for over 20 years, and they have certainly had a lot of excesses in order to achieve their current position, here are some of the highlights we have seen.
- Uptime (99.96%)
This is a very good figure for GoDaddy, with an average uptime of 99.96% over the last 12 months that we have tested.
In this case, no news is the best news, and you certainly don't want to see any failure of your website.
- page load time (455 ms)
After keeping your website running steadily, the next metric to watch is page load time. Slow loading means fewer visitors, lower conversion rates, and less revenue to go with it. Studies have shown that if customers have a bad experience with a website, 79% of them will not buy again.
We have tested dozens of colocation providers over the past few years and the best companies have this figure within 500 milliseconds. goDaddy does well in this regard, with their average time being 455 milliseconds.
- Other Services
GoDaddy is known for domain registration and hosting, but they sell almost all of their products. This means you can use them as a one-stop store to combine your new website with their myriad of products for better functionality.
As an example, GoDaddy has launched a powerful website builder (they call it a website builder) and a free trial so that you can build your own website immediately. In addition, they offer over 100 different plugins in order to add to your website.
Going a step further, GoDaddy will even connect you with a professional web designer.
There are also many other extras available, you just add the product to your cart and pay for it, then call for expert support and let them take care of everything related to technology for you, so you have time to do what you do best.
Disadvantages of GoDaddy
So far, everything is looking good, right?
As a strong brand, GoDaddy has good uptime and page load speeds, and offers a variety of rich extras that we rarely see from a company that offers so many thoughtful services.
However, even the best services have some problems, and GoDaddy is no exception.
- Few additional services
The Economy version is the cheapest plan package in shared hosting:
Unfortunately, they take away a lot of value. The starter plan only allows you to host one website, which in itself is not a problem, but the bad aspect is that GoDaddy does not offer standard services like backups, CDN or SSL certificates. Companies like SiteGround offer these for free, but to ensure server stability, they have limits on the number of monthly visits to the site.
With the heavy price of $7.99/month, the additional features you can get don't seem to match it. But there is good news, we have a discount link here for new users to purchase for only $4/month for the first time.
- Bulk sale
Remember the SSL certificate mentioned earlier? It's needed for any website today, not only to help increase the trust of visitors, but also to influence search result rankings to some extent.
Now, many web hosting companies are starting to offer this service for free, mostly in partnership with Let's Encrypt to help customers get free SSL certificates, but GoDaddy sells them separately.
Unfortunately, this game appears repeatedly on their website, perhaps most shockingly in the email upsell.
Think about it, when you buy a domain name, you should automatically get permission to run the mail service, after all, you already paid for it, and many hosting providers offer this feature for free because it has two benefits.
- There is no additional cost to the company for this service
- This will help customers stay longer
- But GoDaddy will make you pay again.
- Rough money back guarantee
Almost all hosting companies offer at least a 30-day money-back guarantee, as does GoDaddy, but only for annual packages, and their terms say so.
So, if your purchase period is less than 1 year, it will only have 48 hours of testing time.
GoDaddy's prices
GoDaddy's web hosting offers 4 plans.
Economic version
$4/month
- 1 site
- 100GB storage space
- Unlimited Traffic
- View Details
- Deluxe Edition
- $5.5/month
- Unlimited Sites
- Unlimited storage space
- Unlimited Traffic
- Unlimited subdomains
- View Details
- Flagship Edition
- $8.5/month
- Unlimited Sites
- Unlimited storage space
- Unlimited Traffic
- Unlimited subdomains
- Double the capacity of CPU and memory
- Infinite Database
- Free DNS
- Free 1 Year SSL Certificate
- View Details
- Business Hosting
- $15/month
- Unlimited Sites
- Unlimited storage space
- Unlimited Traffic
- Unlimited subdomains
- Double the capacity of CPU and memory
- Infinite Database
- Free DNS
- Free SSL Certificate
- cPanel
- Dedicated Resources
- View Details
- Additional information.
- Domain name: 1 year free use
- Account registration: very easy
- Payment method.
- Hidden fees and terms: 30-day money-back guarantee for annual hosting, 48 hours for monthly
- Account activation: very fast
- Control panel and dashboard: cPanel
Summary
GoDaddy offers a lot of business and consumer-friendly options, such as affordable hosting, Microsoft-based email services, excellent 24/7 customer service. But the drawbacks are also obvious: shared hosting has fewer add-ons, too many upsell options, and the money-back guarantee is not competitive enough.
Advantages
- The world's largest domain name registrar with an outstanding reputation
- Highly acclaimed customer support services
- Very stable uptime
- Windows and Linux based servers
- Provide a large number of attentive human services
- Disadvantages
- Annual hosting with 30-day money-back guarantee, monthly only 48 hours
- Lack of Cloud Managed Hosting
- Many additional sales
- Established: 1997
- Lowest price: $4.00/month
- Uptime: 99.96%
- Page load time: 455 milliseconds
- Hosting plans: web hosting, business hosting, mail server, WordPress hosting, VPS, dedicated server
- Customer Support: Phone
- Control backend: cPanel
- Payment method.
- Money back guarantee: 30 days
- GoDaddy is ranked #14 in our web hosting rankings, click here for more information.