Almost every GoDaddy ad you see is about their domain registration offerings. And those ads have made them the biggest domain name registrar in the business. However, this review isn’t about that service— it’s rather about one of their up-sells: GoDaddy Hosting!
Like all hosting solutions in our best web hosting list, GoDaddy web hosting is primarily aimed at SMBs. But, it’s not in that “Top 5 list”— that too for some very good reasons. If anything, it can be in the most mediocre hosting providers list, if we ever create one.
Well, then why are we writing this review? Shouldn’t we just say “Don’t buy GoDaddy hosting”? It’s not that easy.
Firstly, we are not here only to suggest the best options but also help you avoid the second-rate ones. Secondly, GoDaddy isn’t terrible at everything— their speeds, response times, and uptimes are fairly good. And, also, we will suggest some better alternatives.
Read on to know why we think you shouldn’t opt for GoDaddy web hosting. Let’s start with its overview.
GoDaddy Overview - Main Features
Our ratings | B | 3/5 |
Average response time | ~150 ms |
Avg. response times in top-targeted countries | US: approx. 50 ms | India: approx. 300 ms |
Uptime | 99.97% (guarantees 99.9%) |
Support | 24/7 chat and calls |
Site transfer | Not free |
Introductory Pricing | Starts at $5.99/mo |
Top features | SSD storage, Unmetered bandwidth, free domain, free business email |
Company Information
GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar, managing more than 75 million domain names. It is also the world’s largest web hosting provider, with more than 15% market share.
Additionally, they also sell a wide range of services, including SSL certification, email marketing, website security, e-commerce solutions, and much more.
It all started in 1997. After selling Parsons technology in 1994, Bob Parsons founded GoDaddy in 1997 with the help of private equity funds. Since then, it has grown to this giant of a web company through strategic marketing and acquisitions.
In 2015, It became a publicly-traded company. In 2019, GoDaddy revenue was just short of $3 billion, which they intend to cross this year.
These are the feats GoDaddy achieved with the help of about-9000 employees, who handle more than 18.5 million customers worldwide.
However, being the largest doesn’t mean being the best. GoDaddy web hosting is the perfect example of it. Don’t believe us? Let us lay down a few Pros and Cons of GoDaddy hosting to make our case.
The goods about GoDaddy web hosting
1. Response time is great
Server response time is the time a web browser takes to reach the website’s server for the asked data and come back to start rendering. With GoDaddy, the server response time has been phenomenal.
We put our test site through Bitcatcha to find the server response time. The average server response time throughout the globe was somewhere in the neighborhood of 150ms, which is excellent considering Google recommends 200ms.
In the US, it was exceptional at approx. 50 ms. In India, though, it was above Google’s recommended limit— doesn’t make much of a difference but a downside, nevertheless.
Apart from India, GoDaddy’s server response time is fantastic. However, we would recommend checking Hostinger, given its server response time is better in India(~60 ms) as well as the globe(~125 ms).
2. Sites load fast
Apart from amazing response time, GoDaddy-hosted sites load faster as well.
Loading time is the time it takes for a site to render the accessed web page wholly. If the loading time of a website is more, it directly affects the end-goal(read revenue) of the site:
To test our GoDaddy-hosted site, we added a dummy, text-based WordPress page on our test site, and checked the page load speed using Pingdom and GTmetrix. The average load time was approx. 600 ms, which is well under the limit of 1s.
The primary reason behind this incredible speed is their high-performance SSD. For each plan, they use SSD storage to save data— meaning, the read and write speeds are top-notch.
Overall, the page load time was fantastic. In fact, it was on par with our recommended hosting like Hostinger (~600 ms), Bluehost (~550 ms), and A2hosting (~500 ms).
3. Uptime is good
Another factor where GoDaddy is on par with our recommended hosting is “Uptime”. GoDaddy, like every other web hosting company guarantees 99.9% uptime. And it does deliver. GoDaddy’s servers rarely go down— making it a reliable option.
Uptime is the time during which the server is operational. In our time with GoDaddy hosting, it was almost always operational.
We placed our test site URL in Pingdom’s uptime monitoring system. Throughout our testing, the overall uptime totaled to 99.97% or approximately 14 minutes of downtime per month.
GoDaddy’s Uptime is fantastic but not as exceptional as the uptime of our top two recommended hosting solutions, Hostinger (99.99%) and Bluehost (99.99%).
4. Free domain name & business email
Freebies play a significant part in marketing any web hosting. GoDaddy, being the world’s largest domain registrar, obviously offers a free domain name to onboard new customers.
If you purchase any annual hosting plan from GoDaddy, you get a domain name free for a year. After the first year, it will auto-renew at the then GoDaddy pricing. You can turn off auto-renew, though.
Another freebie GoDaddy offers is professional emails. With collaboration with Office 365, GoDaddy gives Office365 email access free for the first year if you buy any of the annual plans. Similar to the domain name, it will auto-renew once the year is over.
In a nutshell, you get two limited-time freebies with GoDaddy hosting. If compared with other web hosting companies — and we are not only talking about our recommended ones — it’s few.
5. 125+ one-click installs
One of the things we loved about GoDaddy is it’s easily compatible with other popular platforms, whether they are meant for non-tech people or the tech-savvy.
You can integrate more than 125 apps/tools/services with just one click. Content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla are one click away from being on your server. You can also one-click install developer-friendly applications such as cPanel, MySQL, PHP(numerous versions), Python, CloudLinuxOS, etc.
Indeed, other hosting providers offer a one-click install option to add popular platforms like WordPress. But, with GoDaddy, you have more choices.
Things about Godaddy that are just bad
As discussed in the beginning, GoDaddy has some pluses like fast loading speed and good uptime. However, as we reviewed throughout our “Pros” section, many other web hosting providers are similar or better at those elements.
But, these are are the places where the mentioned alternatives are already sorted but GoDaddy isn’t:
1. Expensive
Recurring cost is one of the primary decision factors to filter hosting options. GoDaddy will be left out if affordability is a priority.
GoDaddy is comparatively expensive, period. Maybe they have to cover all those Television ad costs, but it’s not our concern.
With almost similar or even better features, performance, and resource-allocation, Bluehost($2.95/month) and Hostinger (₹79 /month) are available at nearly half the cost. Meaning, relatively, GoDaddy is not worth the money.
Additionally, the renewal costs are even higher than the introductory cost. Add the auto-renewing domain cost and Office365 cost to it, and you have a pretty demanding invoice every year.
Now, we would never suggest cheapening out on hosting, but overpaying? Well, we definitely don’t want our readers to do that. And with GoDaddy, you are overpaying provided the better options out there.
2. Lots of up-sells and cross-sells
It’s already expensive, but they want more of your money. GoDaddy is notorious for its up-sells and cross-sells.
Once you “Add to cart” any of their plans, this is how your cart looks like. They already add a Website Backup plan to the order. FYI, providers like Hostinger offer free backups within the plan.
When you scroll to uncheck the Website backup plan, they have two cross-sells ready. One is for better security and the other is an SSL certificate, both of which cost as much as the plan itself. BTW, most of our recommended hostings offer basic free SSL too.
Overall, GoDaddy’s cross-selling and up-selling tactics are good from their business standpoint, but it tries to sell you things you might not need.
3. Fewer freebies
Continuing the last point: We don’t have any problem if they sell stuff at a fair price, but GoDaddy tries to sell things that are included for free on many of our recommended web hostings.
With GoDaddy, the only freebies are the free domain and the free business email, for which you will be paying once the year passes. Apart from that, you have to pay for SSL certificate, site migration, backups, security, etc.
Let’s compare this to something like Hostinger(which costs less). Hostinger provides free daily backups, free site migration, free SSL, free CDN, and free business email throughout your tenure with them.
Bluehost, too, provides free domain, free SSL, and free email for less than half the price.
In a nutshell, GoDaddy provides a fewer number of freebies despite asking for a premium price. And, this is one of the reasons to opt for other services.
4. Terrible customer support
Freebies do add to the equation, but they are least of our concern when we are testing the hosting provider’s quality. Speed, cost, and technical support are our top three priorities.
As already discussed, their speed is great, but the cost/value is bad. Thus, this one’s a tie-breaker.
Customer support is your only option in times of mishaps. Our criteria for judging customer support includes the number of ways to get in touch, the time it takes to talk to the right person, and the results of the conversation.
Let’s look at all three:
These are the reviews floating around the internet from unhappy GoDaddy users, and the majority of complaints are about their support.
Therefore, its customer support is minus. Meaning, it loses at two of the three priority factors.
According to us, the hosting you choose must be solid at all three factors. Hostinger & Bluehost are our recommendations.
GoDaddy Hosting Plans and Features
GoDaddy is the biggest hosting provider in the business— in fact, one of the largest web companies. So, obviously, they have every hosting option anyone — from an individual to an organization — may need.
We already gave our subjective opinion, so let’s have a look at the plans more objectively.
1. Web Hosting
GoDaddy’s Web Hosting plans are their shared plans. Meaning, in any of these plans, you will be sharing resources with other websites:
2. WordPress Hosting
GoDaddy’s WordPress plans are simply their shared plans with Wordpress-specific benefits, such as CDN Boost, Auto script updates, one-click migration tool, access to free themes, etc.
GoDaddy offers four WordPress hosting plans:
3. Business Hosting
GoDaddy’s business plans are virtual private servers(VPS) with an easy-to-use control panel. They also have one without any panel for the tech-savvy(we will talk about this in a bit).
Here are their Business Hosting plans:
All these plans come with a standard SSL certificate.
4. Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting is meant to, well, resell. If you are in a service business like website creation services, you can purchase one reseller plan and divide it among your clients. Depending on your need, these are the reseller plans by GoDaddy:
5. VPS Hosting
GoDaddy’s VPS plans are like its business plans without a control panel. These plans are virtual machines with fixed resources:
6. Dedicated Servers
With these plans, you literally rent a dedicated server. If you are planning to use these kind of resources, you know what your goal is. So, just let me lay down the numbers:
All the plans are easily scalable, and if you want to learn more of the management site, click here.
GoDaddy Control Panel
GoDaddy does offer root-access for tech-savvy people, but for their regular customers, they use the traditional cPanel. It looks dated, for sure; but it gets the job done, nevertheless.
All the 125+ apps we mentioned earlier can be installed from this control panel. Besides that, you can use cpanel to:
There are many more things you can do with the cPanel, but these are the primary reasons why most of you will open it.
Conclusion- Do we recommend GoDaddy?
No, we don’t.
Having tested dozens of web hosting services in the business, we believe GoDaddy’s web hosting plans are not worth the cost. Their VPS and dedicated plans are considerable, though.
GoDaddy does excel at server response time, uptime, and loading speed. However, besides that, everything goes downhill. The plans are overpriced, the customer support is terrible, you don’t get some vital add-ons for free unlike with some other quality hosting providers, and there are a lot of upsells and cross-sells.
We would recommend going with any of the hosting mentioned in this list. To save you time, Hostinger and Bluehost are the best alternatives— choose any, and you are good to go.
Excellent
Starts at ₹ 79/mo
Starts From
₹79*
monthly
• Best uptime (99.99%)
• Fast, 0.4ms load time as average
• Good & quick customer support