GoDaddy is a very popular web hosting and domain registration company. But is this popularity due to the high quality of hosting?
GoDaddy Hosting offers shared web hosting packages with abundant resources at very low prices as well as a variety of other web hosting services and types such as WordPress hosting, dedicated servers, and VPS servers that cater to the needs of most types of websites.
In order to test the quality of GoDaddy hosting, we purchased hosting from them and tested it for a long time, running load tests and monitoring hosting performance and speed. In this GoDaddy review, we will share our experience with you in the form of points that include the advantages and disadvantages of GoDaddy hosting in detail from the experience of the What is the best hosting team so that you can determine whether GoDaddy hosting is suitable for your site or whether you need another hosting company.
If you're familiar with the web hosting industry, you've probably heard of GoDaddy before - it's one of the biggest names in the industry thanks to its huge advertising campaigns and the popularity of its domain registration service, yet few people know that it also offers web hosting services.
This is not to say that GoDaddy hosting is unpopular, in fact, it is one of the largest hosting providers currently, but it faces stiff competition in the hosting market. On the contrary, it has completely dominated the domain registration market with many times as many users as its closest competitor, serving approximately 15% active domains.
To evaluate the quality of GoDaddy hosting, the What's the Best Hosting team set up a simple WordPress site and monitored its performance continuously for a long time. Using several performance measurement tools, we obtained the necessary data to evaluate and criticize GoDaddy hosting in order to give our visitors a clear idea of the level of service expected from it and what advantages and disadvantages the team discovered during our experience.
Company | GoDaddy |
---|---|
Control panel | cPanel or Plesk |
Hosting services | Shared, WordPress, VPS, Full Servers |
Automatic Backup | Paid addition |
Data centers | 8 geographic locations (3 continents) |
SSL certificate | Free certificate |
Money-Back Guarantee | 30 days |
Technical support | Live chat, phone calls |
Moving the site | Not free |
Domain | Free for visitors to what is the best hosting |
Hosting price | Starting from just 2.99$ |
Page contents
About GoDaddy
GoDaddy is a very well-known tech company with a dominant enough online presence that most people know about it, even those not connected to the tech industry. Of course, part of the reason for this is that it spends lavishly to promote its brand, but it is also known for its great popularity, especially among novice users.
GoDaddy was founded over two decades ago in Baltimore, USA under the name Jomax Technologies which later changed to GoDaddy.
Since then, GoDaddy has become the biggest name in web hosting, with the latest statistics indicating that one out of every 20 websites is hosted on GoDaddy's servers. The company currently employs more than 9,000 professionals to meet the needs of its ever-growing fan base.
GoDaddy is certainly the most successful company in its field. With its financial results indicating that it will generate profits of $3.3 billion in 2020, making it more than the GDP of some developing countries, this gives you an idea of just how big the American company is.
As mentioned above, GoDaddy is a provider of domain registration services and offers a choice of more than 436 top-level domains (TLDs), including all popular domains such as com.
and .net
and info.
Most geographic ranges such as us.
and co.
and uk.
In addition to its most popular shared hosting service, GoDaddy offers virtual and full server packages and can order dedicated servers for hosting WordPress sites, e-commerce stores, and creating reseller accounts. On the other hand, it does not offer cloud hosting services.
GoDaddy Hosting also offers many services related to the field of web hosting, such as its professional email hosting packages using the Microsoft 365 platform, formerly known as Office 365. It also provides many security solutions, advanced SSL certificates, and other services.
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GoDaddy Hosting Advantages
There are many reasons why GoDaddy hosting has become the most popular service in the industry, mostly due to its success in promoting its services and providing a good and satisfying user experience for its customers, in addition to constantly improving the performance of its service and the quality of its technical support. Thanks to this, GoDaddy has not only maintained its huge market share but is trying to expand it to solidify its position as one of the best hosting services and domain registrars.
To clarify this in a simpler way, we will list the advantages of Godaddy hosting and the strengths of its service in the following points and leave the evaluation of the impact of these advantages to our website visitors:
GoDaddy Hosting offers cheap packages with ample resources
GoDaddy's budget plan only allows you to host one website but offers plenty of computing resources in the form of 100GB of storage space, unlimited bandwidth, 10 databases, and support for creating subdomains and multiple FTP accounts.
Obviously, these resources are more than what a single website can use, especially when we talk about shared hosting services, which are usually aimed at small websites for individuals and startups. The abundance of these resources is not limited to GoDaddy's budget plan, as upgrading to higher plans that support hosting more than one website will give you access to unlimited storage space and more databases and FTP accounts.
Despite all these resources, these plans cost less than competing hosting services, with prices starting at 4.33$ for their economy plan. And if you think that's not cheap enough compared to the likes of popular iPage hosting, up-and-coming hosting and domain registrar Namecheap, and well-known web hosting company Hostinger, you'd be more than right.
However, this applies to regular GoDaddy customers as visitors to the What's the Best Hosting website can use the special offer to get the same package for 2.99$ per month, making it one of the cheapest web hosting companies out there.
GoDaddy Hosting offers fast load times for its customers' websites
This has always been a major drawback of GoDaddy hosting in the past, but that changed after the company moved its servers to Amazon's cloud platform to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing technologies and provide better performance for its customers. The American company's efforts to restructure its infrastructure seem to have paid off and most of the performance issues have been resolved, as evidenced by the results of our latency tests.
Since then, the What's the Best Hosting team has noticed a great stability in the results of our load time tests, with the recorded results ranging between 460 and 580 milliseconds over the past year, making it one of the fastest hosting services.
It's comforting to know that GoDaddy hosting overcame its weakness in this indicator, especially since its impact is directly reflected in your site's ranking in search results pages and the user experience it provides to its visitors. Research indicates that your visitors will be more inclined to abandon your site the longer its pages take to load, so What is the Best Hosting advises you to give this point the highest priority when choosing the right hosting service for you.
GoDaddy hosting uptime is high
It's safe to say that having your site go down is the worst thing that can happen to your online business, but unfortunately, the causes of this issue are many and difficult to prevent or avoid entirely. For example, your site could go down because you installed a broken plugin, due to an error in your server settings, or due to a cyber-attack or malware.
Although the source of the error may be on the user's end as well, statistics show that the cause often stems from the service provider, with hardware failures or interruptions in your server's connection to the Internet being the most common causes. Most good hosting services, such as Bluehost, its sister company HostMonster, and others, assure their customers that they can provide a stable service by committing themselves to a guarantee policy that usually states that their users will get at least 99% uptime.
GoDaddy commits itself to a minimum uptime of 99.9% per month, which means that your site's downtime won't exceed 44 minutes per month. But you don't even have to worry about this, as GoDaddy used to have a high uptime rate that averaged 99.95% over the previous year.
Sure, there are many hosting services that offer higher stability such as Bluehost, HostGator, and especially their cloud hosting service, but this rate is already superior to what most competing hosting services offer and is good enough to support your website no matter what type it is.
Godaddy Hosting offers a money-back guarantee policy
If you don't like the hosting service you get, GoDaddy promises a full refund of the money you paid when you signed up for their service if you cancel the service and request a refund within 30 days from the date you purchased the hosting package.
Although most hosting services offer a money-back guarantee, this is a marketing feature offered by the company and there is no obligation for them to offer this policy to their customers. In fact, there are many companies that do not offer any guarantee policy on their service and you will not be able to get your money back if you find the hosting service unsatisfactory. Therefore, What is the Best Hosting considers that a company offering a money-back guarantee policy is a sign of the company's confidence in the quality of its service and its ability to satisfy its customers.
On the other hand, the warranty period offered by GoDaddy Hosting is standard in the hosting market. There are some companies that offer a much longer warranty period, such as DreamHost, and others that use a no-period warranty policy, such as A2 Hosting. But we're happy enough that buying a hosting package from GoDaddy is risk-free thanks to the fact that they allow you to try their service long enough to evaluate its quality and performance.
GoDaddy hosting utilizes cPanel and Plesk control panels
GoDaddy hosting relies on the industry-leading cPanel control panel to manage its servers, which is the preferred control panel for many popular web hosts such as InMotion Hosting and GreenGeeks. Not only is the control panel easy to use and has a plethora of tools, it is also the most popular control panel, making it a favorite among webmasters. This is because it utilizes a familiar interface that makes it easier for them to perform routine tasks smoothly, especially if they are managing multiple sites at the same time.
Even if you have no prior experience with hosting services and control panels, cPanel features a simple graphical interface that aims to make it easy to perform routine tasks such as managing domains and email accounts, installing applications, content management systems, and other basic features without the need for any programming background.
On the other hand, cPanel only works on Linux servers, so if you buy a Windows package, you'll get access to Plesk instead. When it comes to Windows servers, Plesk is your best and most popular option, and it's cPanel's main competitor, offering all the usual features you've come to expect from cPanel.
Unlike other hosting services that use a proprietary control panel, GoDaddy Hosting uses a familiar control interface to manage its services to enhance the user experience of its customers, even if it means giving up a portion of its profits, making it one of the easiest hosting services to use.
Godaddy Hosting offers outstanding technical support
This is another area where GoDaddy's performance has improved in recent years, as we used to hear a lot of criticism of the company's technical support department, but we felt it was a normal situation since it serves millions of users. Fortunately, the American company has found a way to change that and make technical support less vulnerable to criticism, which greatly improves the user experience for its customers.
GoDaddy provides technical support through the usual channels such as the knowledge base on its official website, live phone calls, and live chats with technical support staff. In addition, GoDaddy Hosting provides support and guidance in multiple languages, but unfortunately it does not include Arabic yet.
In recent times, the chat-based technical support service has seen welcome improvements such as reducing the wait time and getting rid of the autoresponder, which used to take a long time before you were connected to a staff member. Now, as soon as you submit a query or request for help, you'll start chatting directly with one of our technical support staff and receive thorough guidance in a professional and friendly manner.
For example, website migration is a paid service in GoDaddy hosting, but the technical support staff offered to help us by guiding us through the entire process if we preferred to manually migrate the website instead of paying for the service.
The only drawback to GoDaddy's chat support is that it's limited to business days, meaning it's available Monday through Friday every week. However, if you have an emergency, their technical support lines are open 24/7, and you can use their extensive knowledge base to search for specific instructions or solutions to a common issue by browsing the dedicated section or using the search box at the top of the page.
It is important to note that GoDaddy hosting does not provide email technical support, which is one of the main support channels, but it is characterized by having huge support forums thanks to its large fan base. These forums contain Godaddy users' experiences and discussions, and you can use them to get help from other users or ask for advice on how to manage different aspects of your site.
GoDaddy provides Windows hosting
GoDaddy Hosting seems to be leaving no stone unturned to expand its already huge fan base to the point where it is willing to provide Windows Server hosting servers to meet the needs of its customers whose sites require support for ASP.NET, .NET, .NET Core, Microsoft SQL databases, and other Microsoft web development technologies.
It's good to know that GoDaddy hosting won't neglect this segment of users, who usually have a hard time finding servers that meet their requirements because hosting companies avoid using Windows to run their servers. Moreover, Godaddy doesn't charge extra for these servers like other competing hosting services such as HostGator.
If you choose one of GoDaddy's Windows hosting plans, you'll get a server running Windows® Server 2012 R2 and access to the Plesk control panel to manage your hosting instead of cPanel for the Linux plans. You'll be able to create additional Microsoft SQL databases up to 200MB per database.
GoDaddy Hosting has multiple data centers
Establishing multiple data centers around the world is a necessary step for any hosting company that wants to strengthen its presence in the global hosting market. Limiting themselves to data centers located in one place weakens their ability to attract customers who target regions that are geographically distant from the location of those data centers. Most hosting companies, including FastComet, have data centers in at least North America and Europe, as these two regions represent the largest target markets for web hosting services.
GoDaddy has multiple data centers within the United States at its headquarters in Arizona, Virginia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Ashburn to serve its customers in the Americas. There is also a data center in Amsterdam, Europe and another in Singapore, Asia to meet the needs of its customers in those regions.
In most cases, What is the Best Hosting website recommends choosing the data center that is geographically closest to the area your website is targeting in order to reduce response time. But you don't have to worry about how to choose the best data center, as GoDaddy Hosting will suggest the most suitable data center for you based on your current geographical location, and the company allows you to change it later if you discover that it is not suitable for your location.
All you need to do is head over to your GoDaddy account control panel and request to move your current server to a specific data center. You'll need to decide when to move your site, as this process requires it to be out of service until the transfer is complete, so be sure to choose a time when your site's traffic is at a minimum.
GoDaddy Hosting offers free Office 365 mail
Godaddy's hosting packages include support for creating email boxes using the cPanel control panel as is customary for its competitors, something that is not available in Cloudways hosting, for example, unfortunately, but it also provides a free subscription to Microsoft's popular cloud platform Office 365, which is a better alternative and more compatible with the rest of Microsoft's office services such as Excel, PowerPoint, and others.
This email service will rely on a completely separate service provider (Microsoft) and will give you 5GB of dedicated storage space for your email inbox. Best of all, your email will utilize the best cloud technology available today, which uses artificial intelligence to filter spam and protect your mailbox from malware.
However, it's worth reminding you that this service is free for the first year only, after which you will have to pay 23.88$ to renew it annually. In addition, the number of mailboxes is limited to one, and if you want more than that, you'll need to pay for it or create a regular email address via cPanel.
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Disadvantages of Godaddy Hosting
Godaddy hosting performs well in performance indicators according to the tests conducted by the Best Hosting team, and its service provides reliable technical support and abundant computing resources in all its plans, in addition to the possibility of obtaining a discount that makes it one of the cheapest hosts currently available, which makes it a favorite of many users who want to move from free hosting to paid hosting.
With this in mind, you may feel that GoDaddy hosting doesn't have any obvious weaknesses in its service, but in reality, it has many flaws that are hard to spot before actually using its hosting. However, if you look at GoDaddy's benefits section, you'll notice that it doesn't have the performance or resource issues that some of its competitors have.
Instead, our experience with their hosting service revealed a distinct lack of additional features and the company's attempts to sell more services are annoyingly repetitive. We detail these and other shortcomings in the following points:
GoDaddy's hosting plans include a few extra features
When you buy a hosting package from GoDaddy, what you get is mostly just the hosting service, as there are no additional services that we are used to seeing in the hosting offers of competing services. For example, unless you buy one of the top two plans, you won't get an SSL certificate or built-in CDN support, and the free domain is only available when you use a discount coupon like the one offered by What's the Best Hosting website.
We can't think of a reason why the lower plans lack these basic features, especially since both of them have free alternatives that are provided by most hosting services and require only the click of a button to activate. Of course, Godaddy hosting does not mind adding these features manually and even provides detailed instructions for doing so, but this option is only suitable for specialists and those with the necessary technical knowledge.
This also applies to automatic backup, location transfer, and other additional services. The only difference is that they are not available for free even for its larger plans and you will have to buy them separately.
Unfortunately, many of these services are very important. You can't ignore the use of an SSL certificate or your visitors will get warning notices from their browser when they visit your site. Abandoning the automatic backup feature puts you at an increased risk of losing your data, and you can't underestimate the power of CDNs to improve your site's page load speed.
The fact that GoDaddy hosting doesn't offer an easy way to activate these features for free says a lot, especially when you see ads for paid products like advanced SSL certificates and additional service packs that include backup scheduling and CDN access everywhere in your control panel.
There is a significant increase in subscription renewal prices
GoDaddy's plans start at 4,33$ per month for its Economy plan, which offers minimal specifications and computing resources. While the resources you'll get are more than most of the competition, we can't call this price cheap as many services offer hosting packages that cost less than this. You can use our Cheapest Hosting page to see how cheap hosting prices look compared to GoDaddy's costs.
In addition, this price is actually a promotional price, which means that it is already discounted, and without that discount, the real price could reach double that figure. Fortunately, What's the Best Hosting was able to get a coupon code that allows its users to purchase this plan for 2.99$ per month, making it one of the cheapest hosting packages available.
However, the issue of high renewal prices remains, which means you'll be paying the full value of the plan at the end of the initial subscription period, which equates to 8,99$ per month. This figure is double the promotional price of the package and nine times the price of the What's the Best Hosting website, destroying its previous image as a cheap hosting.
There is no way around this issue as both the promotional price and the What's the Best Hosting offer can only be used once per customer and the initial booking period is limited to 12 months. After that, you will have no choice but to pay high renewal prices or move your site to another service.
SSL certificate is not free on lower plans
SSL certificates can no longer be characterized as an unnecessary add-on. While your website will function normally without them, your site's search engine ranking and user experience will be severely compromised.
After Google's latest update to its search engine algorithm, encrypting your site's connection is now one of the factors that affect its favorable ranking, which means more reasons to use SSL certificates. Fortunately, using a free SSL certificate from let's encrypt will do the trick, so most hosting services offer a free SSL certificate as part of all their packages.
But that Does not apply to GoDaddy hosting unless you purchase one of their larger plans. The company offers these certificates as a paid add-on with prices starting at 75$ per year. Of course, you can try installing a free SSL certificate from let's encrypt using the SSH command line, but this process requires technical skills and will need to be repeated every 90 days.
Update: GoDaddy's hosting packages now come with free SSL, but it should be noted that the small package comes with the certificate for only one year and after the year is up you will need to pay a separate fee in order to continue using the SSL certificate.
There is no free transfer of your site to Godaddy's servers
Many hosting services allow you to request the transfer of your existing website to their servers for free with a team of specialists who will handle the entire process from server setup, file transfer, domain settings and database entries as well if required.
Transferring your site from one service to another requires a fair amount of technical background that the site owner or administrator may not have, so enlisting the help of professionals is usually their best option. Fortunately, there are many hosting services that will do it for you for free and some are willing to transfer more than one site.
Unfortunately, GoDaddy hosting is not one of those services, as their plans do not include the service of transferring your site. Although they say in their terms of service that transferring your site to their servers is a courtesy that you may or may not get, we couldn't get it for free during our trial as it requires a payment of 99.99$ per site and database.
This means that you will need to pay more than your annual hosting cost to move your site to GoDaddy's servers, reinforcing the previously mentioned point that their service does not include the usual basic features in an attempt to push you to buy it as a paid service.
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GoDaddy Hosting Prices
Shared hosting is GoDaddy's most popular service, so in this section we will include the technical and technical details of its packages in an effort to make it easier for website visitors to choose the right package.
In addition, What's the Best Hosting will provide a coupon code that lets you get GoDaddy hosting for only 10% off its price. So don't forget to use this offer if you decide to buy one of their packages.
Economy package | Deluxe package | Ultimate package | Maximum package | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Number of sites | 1 | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
Storage capacity | 100GB | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
Bandwidth | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
Free SSL certificate | No | No | Included in the package | Included in the package |
Databases | 10 | 25 | unlimited | unlimited |
Private DNS server | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Scheduled Backup | No | No | No | No |
Price before a website discount What is the best hosting? | $8.99 | $11.99 | $16.99 | $24.99 |
Price after discount | $2.99 | $7.99 | $12.99 | $19.99 |
Discount coupon | Activation of the discount | Activation of the discount | Activation of the discount | Activation of the discount |
Frequently Asked Questions about Godaddy Hosting
In this section of our review, we will answer the most frequently asked questions about GoDaddy and its hosting service. If you have a question that we haven't covered here, feel free to ask by using the comments section at the bottom of this page:
What is Godaddy Hosting?
What control panel does GoDaddy hosting use?
GoDaddy uses cPanel and Plesk to manage its Linux and Windows-based hosting services, respectively.
What payment methods does GoDaddy accept?
Payment methods may vary from country to country but they generally accept all standard credit cards such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and Amex. You can also pay via PayPal or by using GoDaddy gift cards as well.
What services does Godaddy offer?
GoDaddy offers domain reservation services, web hosting of various types, security services, and email hosting through Microsoft 365.
This concludes our review of GoDaddy's hosting service and analyzes the quality of its hosting.
If you rely on GoDaddy to host your site or have previous experience with them, we'd love to hear about your experience and what you think of the level of service you received in the comments section below this review.