But this is not a popularity contest…
… Instead, I am about to review GoDaddy, so that you know what to expect from their performance, what the deal is with their support and how much it will really cost you – spoiler alert, their pricing can get confusing.
What Products Does GoDaddy Offer?
GoDaddy offers dozens of products and comes with many available plans. So, first let me tell you a bit more about their hosting offer.
- GoDaddy is one of the largest domain name registrars. With them you can get almost any domain extension you are looking for: .com, .net, .org, .law or even .today. A .com domain will cost you $11.99 the first year and $17.99 after, not the cheapest.
- At GoDaddy, there are shared hosting plans available too. It’ll cost you between $8.99 and $24.99 at renewal. With this type of hosting service, you’ll share a server with other clients. It’s suitable for small and medium projects that don’t need top performing servers.
- Like many other hosting providers, GoDaddy has a WordPress optimized shared hosting service. They seem to prepare their servers for a higher WordPress performance, offer WordPress pre-installed and have a selection of themes available. Nothing too exciting if you ask me. It starts at $9.99 a month when you renew.
- GoDaddy VPS plans are for those with special server configuration needs. With the root (administrative) access you’ll be able to configure your server to your preferences. They also come with a higher performance than shared hosting plans. VPS plans at GoDaddy start at $6 a month (self-hosted) and can go all the way up to $174 per month.
- If the higher performance of a VPS is not enough for your site, a dedicated hosting package is your best next option. With these, you’ll have your own server for yourself and won’t have neighbors interfering with your project. But you’ll need a budget for that as dedicated servers start at $149.99 per month at GoDaddy.
- GoDaddy also offers email hosting plans, so you can have a professional-looking address like info@your-business.com. They start at $5.99 per user per month for 10 GB of email storage.
- For the less tech-savvy users, they also have a website builder to create your site with. To be honest, it’s not my favorite site builder as some features come up a bit short (e.g. the blog). Other alternatives like Weebly, Wix or Squarespace seem to me more well-rounded.
But their offering doesn’t stop there, among others they also have a hosting reseller program so you can sell hosting plans to your clients, web design services and SEO consulting.
GoDaddy Pricing: What Do Their Shared Plans Include?
* Even if officially they don’t limit the traffic you can get, if your website gets too much traffic or uses too many resources, they’ll request that you upgrade. Check this article for more information about GoDaddy prices.
The Economy plan is for those only looking to host 1 website (1 domain) and don’t need more than 100 GB of storage. It also comes with a database limitation of 10. SSL certificates aren’t included either.
The Deluxe tier comes with the same specs and features as the Economy package, but you’ll be able to host unlimited websites with it, and a maximum of 25 databases are allowed.
If you need a higher performance (e.g. 2 CPUs and 1 GB of memory) you can purchase the Ultimate plan. It also comes with free SSL certificate (for the first term) and unlimited databases.
With the Maximum tier, you’ll get 2 GB of memory.
I don’t like that some basic features you’ll need aren’t included with the shared hosting plans. For example, if you want to have your sites backed up, it’ll cost you around $3 extra a month for 5 GB of storage, and SSL certificates are about $7 extra a month (in a time where most hosting companies offer free Let’s Encrypt certificates!).
This adds up quickly. The Economy plan jumps from $8.99 to $17.50 a month when these must-have add-ons are purchased. Not so ‘Economy’ anymore.
GoDaddy Review: Pros & Cons
GoDaddy is one of the largest domain name registrars and reputable hosts. Their performance is good and offers tons of web storage. However, it lacks some features like backups, SSL certificates and staging areas.
Let’s check out the main pros and cons in detail:
But you are probably wondering when is it a good idea to use GoDaddy and when it’s not. Let me give you a couple of examples.
When to Use GoDaddy’s Hosting?
First of all, you should set aside some budget for hosting, as GoDaddy comes out a bit pricey, especially when you start adding the basic add-ons.
I would suggest GoDaddy’s shared hosting for those looking for a host that’s very generous with the storage and doesn’t measure your traffic.
GoDaddy also offers Windows-based hosting services, this may be a good argument to convince some.
When Not to Use GoDaddy’s hosting?
I would not suggest GoDaddy if you need an affordable hosting provider, check DreamHost and GreenGeeks instead.
In our tests, GoDaddy has also proved to be a reliable hosting provider speed-wise, but had a bad uptime ratio. So serious projects like avid bloggers should consider other alternatives like SiteGround or DreamHost.
Finally, those looking for advanced options like staging areas, server-side caching or CMS (e.g. WordPress) optimization options may want to check out other alternatives.
GoDaddy Shared Hosting Details
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* All your files combined (storage, databases, emails, etc), can’t be more than 250,000.
GoDaddy Performance Tests
I checked GoDaddy’s performance to see if they are a reliable hosting provider. I’ve tested their uptime and speed using several tools: StatusCake, Pingdom, GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights.
GoDaddy Speed Test
No one wants to have a slow hosting provider. Website visitors hate having to stare at a blank page that never seems to load.
This can cost you conversions as visitors will go elsewhere if they have to wait too long to read your content. And of course, the faster your site the higher search engines will rank it.
With an average loading time of 2.50 seconds, GoDaddy wasn’t the top-performing host in our tests, but they were not too far from SiteGround at the top of the list with an average loading speed of 2.10 seconds.
Is GoDaddy’s Uptime Good?
The uptime measures how much time your website was online. Believe it or not, hosting providers can’t always guarantee that your site will be online 100% of the time.
Having a 99.95% uptime (or 0.05% downtime) is considered a good result. So if you are serious about your website, you should always aim for this. Otherwise, you may get punished by search engines and of course you’ll be offering a poor user experience to your visitors.
To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.
I am not happy with GoDaddy’s uptime performance. As you can see in the above table, they had an uptime of 99.90% – not even close to the 99.95% you should be aiming for.
GoDaddy Review: Do I Recommend It?
Overall, I think GoDaddy offers a solid product to host small websites. I liked:
- Their decent speed
- Apart from classic Linux hosting, they also offer Windows-based hosting services – not many providers do
- Their easy to follow and intuitive interface
- Their unlimited bandwidth and generous storage
However, it has a couple of hidden downsides that you should know about. Some basic features like SSL and backups aren’t included in their already pricey plans – in the end, GoDaddy gets expensive.
Advanced features like staging areas are also missing, and they don’t offer migration services for new accounts. This may be a deal-breaker for developers or agencies. Sadly, its bad uptime record makes this provider not a good choice for larger sites.
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