GoDaddy Review Summary
With 18 million customers globally, 77 million domain names under management and a venerable history stretching back to its founding in 1997, GoDaddy is one of the biggest web hosting services out there. They even regularly run Superbowl ads. And it’s certainly an okay service. However, we’re sorry to tell you that it doesn’t look great when stacked against its competition.
Specifically, while the GoDaddy hosting service offers a solid range of hosting options and a genuinely great feature spread, it falters in two key areas. First, its support options aren’t the best, lacking 24/7 live chat features or ticket support that most competitors offer. Second, its up time performance (the amount of time it kept websites operational) wasn’t as good as the majority of web hosting services Tech.co included in its tests.
That said, GoDaddy is still worth considering. This review covers GoDaddy’s different hosting plans, looking at their costs, their benefits and drawbacks, and which one might be best for your needs.
In this review:
- Which GoDaddy Plan Is Best?
- GoDaddy Hosting Costs
- GoDaddy Shared Hosting
- GoDaddy VPS Hosting
- GoDaddy Dedicated Hosting
- GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
- Verdict – Should You Use GoDaddy Hosting?
Which GoDaddy Plan Is Best?
GoDaddy offers four types of hosting plan, and each type of plan comes with different tiers. The right plan and tier will mainly depend on the size of your business.
The first option is shared hosting. This plan hosts your website on a web server that’s also shared with other websites. It’s cheaper, but if you get too much traffic, all the sites on the server will run more slowly. Next is dedicated hosting, which hosts your website on a server all by itself: It’ll run faster and perform better, but cost a lot more. The third option, VPS hosting, hosts your site on a designated area of a server, as a sort of halfway measure: It’s more reliable than shared hosting, but less costly than dedicated hosting.
Finally, the fourth option is WordPress hosting. It’s a little different: It’s essentially just shared hosting, but with the added benefit of the WordPress website creation software, which helps out newbies with details like the website design and blogging abilities.
Make sense? Here’s what determines which plan you should go for:
- Shared Hosting – best for small, inexpensive brochure-style websites
- VPS Hosting – best for well-travelled websites for mid-sized, growing businesses
- Dedicated Hosting – best for feature-rich websites run by large companies
- WordPress Hosting – the easiest option, best for small and mid-sized business websites
GoDaddy Hosting Costs
Once you have your plan picked out, you’ll need to figure out which tier is best for you. This depends on the amount of storage space you’ll need, the features you want, and the level of support you need.
With the right discount, you can save even more than you think. GoDaddy hosting offers plenty of deals — but be wary of how much you’ll be paying down the line, and remember to read all the disclaimers.
You can access a few deals below, if you can settle on a plan you’re interested in from this table showcasing all of GoDaddy’s web hosting options.
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How much higher are GoDaddy’s prices than the average? You can learn more by clicking through to Tech.co’s guide on typical web hosting costs.
GoDaddy Shared Hosting
Shared hosting service plans are one of the most popular options, as they’re best for simple, inexpensive websites. Most people or small business operations don’t need to do much more online than set up a virtual storefront: A quick brochure-style site might feature a main landing page, an “About” page, and a “Contact” page.
All four GoDaddy shared hosting plans include 24/7/365 support, but the number or amount of domains, storage space, and subdomains varies depending on your chosen tier. Here’s a graph charting the features you’ll get with each tier.
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GoDaddy VPS Hosting
Reliable, available, and great for fast-growing businesses with a strong online presence: GoDaddy’s VPS hosting options are best of medium businesses who need a little bandwidth to stretch in. Each tier in GoDaddy’s VPS plans increases the memory and storage space available, alongside other benefits. Here are the specs to expect from GoDaddy’s four VPS plan tiers.
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GoDaddy Dedicated Hosting
The most power, the most control, and the highest cost: Dedicated hosting plans offer all the bandwidth, memory, and storage a corporation could need to host an impressive website. GoDaddy offers seven server locations globally, across the US, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Compared to the other plans available from GoDaddy, all of these tiers will cost a pretty penny. Still, for a huge business, any web hosting company’s prices are easy to swallow. Here are features and benefits tied to each of GoDaddy’s four dedicated hosting tiers.
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GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
Newbies and website Luddites should consider the WordPress hosting plan: It’ll host your site and create the front-end look for your website: You can chose from thousands of website templates that can define the entire look of your site with a single click. If you run a small or mid-sized operation, and you don’t want to have to learn anything about web design or coding, than the WordPress hosting plan is probably your best bet.
Each of the four WordPress hosting tiers includes:
- 1 free domain (with annual plan)
- Premium WordPress Hosting platform
- Thousands of WordPress templates and plugins
- Free daily backups
- WordPress software and security auto-updates
Verdict – Should You Use GoDaddy?
We can’t wholeheartedly recommend using GoDaddy. Granted, it isn’t the worst web hosting service you could use – it comes with a nice feature set and offers generous storage across all of its plans. But the sub-par up time and support it offers ultimately means that GoDaddy can’t justify its high-end, above-average pricing.
