Overview

Godaddy is an exceptionally popular brand in the domain name registration space. In fact, the company is deemed by many to be the World’s No.1 Domain Name registrar with in excess of 70 million names under its management and over 16 million customers spread across the world. In the same measure, the firm is also a big shot in the web hosting industry where it offers several packages targeted at different categories of users based on resource usage and preferences.

Originally known as Jomax Technologies, Godaddy was launched in 1997 by Bob Parsons. Currently, the company is based in Arizona, Iowa where its biggest data center that occupies over 430,000 square feet of space is also located. Other data centers can be found in Chicago, Virginia (Ashburn), Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

In this Godaddy review, we take a closer look at key aspects of Godaddy including its hosting plans and their respective pricing, features, strengths and weaknesses, and FAQs.

GoDaddy Features

Performance and speed

Thinking of taking your online presence a step further by investing in a website? Then you’ll need to get an appropriate hosting service. By ‘appropriate’, we are talking about excellent performance and loading speeds to ensure that your site loads up quickly and flawlessly. GoDaddy is widely acknowledged for its website domain names business. And now, its hosting service is slowly catching up thanks to the company’s continued commitment to invest in dependable server infrastructure

Below are some of the perks to enjoy with this company:

99.9% uptime guarantee

Having a host with reliable uptime ensures that your website remains online and accessible to your visitors at all times. As a result, GoDaddy has invested in state of the art servers and data centers to ensure that their uptime remains well above 99.9%. Their enormous Phoenix data center is particularly key in anchoring the company’s global infrastructure.

Easy integration with CDNs

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) serve the role of caching your website across multiple servers that are networked. What this means for your website is that if a user makes a request for your site on a browser, the files will be sent from the closest server to the user thereby cutting down on the loading time. Generally, e-commerce sites operate under the rule of thumb: the slower the site, the fewer the purchases will be.

However, GoDaddy doesn’t offer CDNs: rather, they support the integration of CDNs with Cloudflare options.

Multiple hosting options

To ensure that each customer reaps maximum benefits with their sites, GoDaddy identified three major hosting packages. These make it a whole lot easier for the customers to pick the best-fit features for their specific needs.

The first plan you can subscribe for is shared web hosting. Essentially, this involves having various servers with each hosting multiple websites that have access to all of its resources. While shared web hosting is way cheaper than the other more advanced hosting plans, the loading speeds may be slower particularly if a server gets crowded.

The second option is Virtual Private Server (VPS) which means that each site is allocated a predefined amount of server resources; however, there will still be multiple sites in that very server. As a result, if one of the parties uses up their resource allocation, the other parties will not be affected.

Dedicated servers are the last option and the ultimate plan. With these plans, you get to enjoy the entire server resources on your own. As expected, this option is also more expensive but will grant you more wiggling space in case you need to add new content and features to your website.

Security

Gone are the days when hackers only targeted the big enterprises; nowadays, anyone with a website needs to stay alert against cyber-attacks.

Check out the following security features on GoDaddy Platform:

Premium Succuri plugin

GoDaddy offers a powerful, yet simple solution to ensure that your website stays clean. Succuri performs regular scans on your website to detect malware that could be infecting files and gives an immediate notification if any changes to the site files are detected.

Another benefit that Succuri offers is monitoring your site for blacklisting by Google if it’s considered harmful to visitors. In case Google flags your site, Succuri will identify the reason behind that and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Daily site backups

It’s always advisable for every website owner to do regular backups. It offers insurance against all setbacks such as inadvertently deleting your entire site.

With GoDaddy, you can easily sign up for Site Backup plan which offers automatic integration with your hosting account.

This platform performs daily backups and malware scans of your site. The web host allows you to create backup copies of your site or pay an inexpensive monthly fee to have your site files backed up in the cloud. The storage is fully secure with no limit when you want to share files. GoDaddy also allows you to store the information from your iPhone.

Other Security features include:

• The SHA-2 and 2048 bit encryption is a feature that Godaddy provides for all its hosting plans. It also comes with an option to buy SiteLock, a service that offers malware and spam monitoring, app scanning, and site-verification certificates.

• All plans use the popular secure shell feature and further utilizes spam detection in the control panel and email accounts.

• Accounts are locked behind password protection to restrict access to private files.

• Better yet, you can make your data much safer by using SSL certificates available on GoDaddy.

Customer Support

Your website depends direly on the support of your web host: this is because a slight glitch could result in a painful loss of your customers. Luckily, GoDaddy has put in place a few support measures as follows to help you resolve all technical issues affecting your website:

US-based support

One of the benefits you derive by having this web host is guaranteed quality support that’s based in the US. And while their response may sometimes not be so punctual, the quality of support you get from them is commendable. Besides, the team here is generally knowledgeable on various unique website issues.

24/7 support

GoDaddy’s support department has been working constantly on themselves to improve their reputation which wasn’t so good a few years back. Today, they boast an award-winning team of expert staff that readily handles customer support emails and tickets 24 hours a day, 7 days in a week.

Multi-lingual channels

GoDaddy is popular for its knowledgeable responses from the customer support. With a dedicated sub-domain on its website, you can reach the team via a range of channels such as e-mail, tickets, forums, blogs, and groups. You can also use the telephone support that’s available in English or Spanish. Usually, it could take you up to 5 minutes before the support responds to calls.

Easy WordPress auto-install

One notable aspect you’ll like about GoDaddy Hosting is its easy Wordpress auto-install provision. This feature make installing WP a breeze especially for most new customers with minimal experience working with this CMS. All you have to do is purchase a hosting for your site and select auto-install in the hosting account. Your website should be up and running in a few hours With GoDaddy security in place.

Alternatively, you can choose the manual installation if you’d want to implement the steps yourself: Godaddy offers hundreds of interactive, voice-guided tutorials to teach you the basics of Wordpress set up procedure.

Knowledgebase

Apart from having a knowledgeable staff, GoDaddy is also a quality source of most answers to your support questions. The company has written numerous articles that offer a great deal of knowledge.

GoDaddy cPanel

GoDaddy offers two Panel options: WHM for Linux and Parallel Plesk for Windows. Its custom cPanel is particularly quite impressive with a non-cluttered interface as well as advanced site controls. The company offers various ways to access the cPanel including through your account management tool and through a direct login link.

Here are some of the functions that you can perform on the cPanel:

• Create files

• Manage DNS

• Unzip files

• Compress files

• Delete directorates

• Add support for Non-parsed Headers on Linux hosting plan

• Change resource limits

• Opening non-standard port on VPS

• Changing Name servers for cPanel

45 days Money Back Guarantee

While features from one package to the other vary, Cloudways is consistent on delivering basics that work decently for every level user. In this section, we’ll discuss them in six primary categories

eCommerce Features

Godaddy has a new software called GoDaddy Online Store which is an upgrade of the old quick shopping Cart e-commerce software. The new shop comes with impressive features such as SEO tools, secure checkout, store themes, as well as unlimited product listings.

Setting up your shop with the new tool is easy and straightforward. You only need to select a theme, pricing, products, images, and your preferred payment methods. If you need to sell products via your site, this feature can never be more helpful.

Extras

Free domain name

GoDaddy offers free domain names for the first year for every hosting plan you purchase from them.

Free website migration

When migrating your website from another host to GoDaddy, the company will offer this service to you free of charge. They also ensure that your site doesn’t go offline during the process.

Free website builder

GoDaddy provides a trial version of its GoCentral Website Builder with every hosting plan. However, once the trial version expires, you will need to purchase the full version.

$200 worth of credits

Use these credits to get the word out there about your business. They come in the form of Google Adwords, Yahoo and Bing Adwords credits for you to market your site.

1-click app install

With over 100 custom apps supported, GoDaddy’s hosting platform will completely revolutionize your website. Installations and uninstallations can be done quickly thanks to the 1-click option to manage your apps. Some of the key apps available here include WordPress, Drupal, CloudLinux, and even MySQL.

Strengths and Weaknesses of GoDaddy Hosting

Godaddy, just like any other business, has its strengths and weaknesses. As such, it’s recommended that you weigh both to understand whether the company is the right fit for your hosting needs or not.

Strengths

Affordable prices

Compared to several options available in the market today, GoDaddy is one of the best in terms of affordability. The best part is that if you stick with them for a few years, they can always offer you even better prices. Domain registration is available for a quite affordable price and you also get one of the lowest priced plans. The company also dishes out coupons and discounts to users throughout the year.

1-click WordPress installation

You might have realized that it takes quite some time to download WordPress manually especially if your internet is slow: thankfully, you can rely on GoDaddy for an automatic solution using their 1-click WP installation feature.

Fast loading time

Slow loading speeds can be catastrophic to your website and business performance: often resulting in a huge loss of customers. GoDaddy has put in place structures to help your website load faster including having servers near visitors’ locations and using fast storage drives.

Unlimited visitors

As you already know, a website with too many visitors may lag and maybe even crash losing its reputation among users. GoDaddy saves you from any of this by ensuring all its plans can support unlimited visitors at no extra cost.

Security

You can have good night sleep knowing that your site is secure, thanks to GoDaddy’s impressive security systems that deter spammers and hackers. With cyber-attacks on the rise nowadays, you can make your website safer with GoDaddy as your host.

Multiple payments options

GoDaddy accepts most of the major currencies and credit cards for its payments. The company also allows use of PayPal and a few other digital payment platforms with ease.

Cons of GoDaddy Web Hosting

No live chat support

Despite their upgraded customer service with quick response time, Godaddy still lack a live chat support system. However, phone support is available and quick in most cases.

Restoration fees

Most web hosting company offer to restore a website at zero costs in case of a breakdown or hacking experience. However, GoDaddy charges a restoration fee which can rise depending on the work involved in completing the task.

Limitations on storage

GoDaddy puts several strict restrictions on data and disk space usages except for a few of its hosting plans. This might not be go well with webmasters managing huge sites that are growing rapidly.

GoDaddy Frequently Asked Questions

Who owns GoDaddy?

GoDaddy was founded in 1997 and is still owned albet in part by its founder, Robert Parsons. However, about 70% of GoDaddy stake was bought by a private equity consortium a few years ago. Nevertheless, Robert Parsons retains the largest individual share that stands at 28% of the company. GoDaddy is one of the pioneers in the hosting and domain industry and claims to serve over 16 million customers worldwide.

Where are GoDaddy servers located?

GoDaddy boasts a massive 430,000 square feet data center at Phoenix in Arizona. The US-based company also runs other centers in Los Angeles, Ashburn, and Chicago alongside other international facilities in Singapore and Amsterdam.

Do I get unlimited bandwidth and storage?

Nothing truly comes unlimited, neither is GoDaddy’s storage and bandwidth. Shared plans do come with 250,000 files (folders) with each email counting as a file. Besides, the web host puts “soft” caps on other resources. You may have to check the terms and conditions to understand the contract carefully. Just like most other popular hosts, GoDaddy reserves the right to throttle your website's resources if excess bandwidth or storage is detected.

What is GoDaddy’s cheapest plan?

The cheapest plan comes with unlimited bandwidth and 100GB storage. There’s a free domain for the first year which is included during the purchase.

Does GoDaddy offer domain registration? What’s the cost and is my information secure?

GoDaddy is reputable for domain name business and therefore you can get your domain name here. Besides, the firm offers free domains with some of their hosting plans. Regarding the privacy of your information, you can rest assured that your information is secure with them. You can also apply for a WHOIS privacy to safeguard any sensitive information about your domain name.

I need to transfer my site to GoDaddy. What is the process?

Unfortunately, GoDaddy provides limited support when you need to do site or domain transfers. If you experience any trouble, you can get a large amount of comprehensive documentation online that offer information on the processes. You can also get other private and third-party organizations that will walk you through the process.

Are there any special security features with GoDaddy?

In addition to code signing and SSL certificates, you get Sitelock website security which helps to detect malware and monitor your website for issues such as blacklisting on search engines.

How can GoDaddy perform as a host on my WordPress Site?

GoDaddy features several WordPress specific packages for hosting. Three of the available plans are managed hosting. The company encourages and largely supports the use of Wordpress as a content management system. In fact, they have a built-in migration feature to make it easier for you to move your WordPress website hosting to GoDaddy.

As with most large hosting providers, there have been a few security incidents involving the web host in recent years. For this reason, GoDaddy is constantly improving their security policies.

Can I automate WordPress installation with GoDaddy?

The web host offers both manual and automatic ways to automate Wordpress installation. The manual installation is easy. However, you can save time by using the WordPress Managing Tool Suite that GoDaddy offers. Get assistance in WordPress software updates and site backups. What’s more, take advantage of GoDaddy tech support available all year long for any issues you might encounter with your WP site.

Which GoDaddy Plan is best for WordPress Sites?

The best plan to purchase for self-hosted WordPress Site will depend on the total number of sites hosted. The Developer plan is the most expensive plan but the most suitable for people with up to 5 websites and 800,000 visitors or more per month. The Ultimate Plan on the hand can be used for 2 WordPress Sites and up to 400, 000 monthly visitors.

GoDaddy also provides managed WordPress options which come with bonuses like staging areas, WordPress installed by default, and dedicated support.

Does GoDaddy offer site building software? Can I get customizable templates?

GoDaddy features a user-friendly site builder program that’s extremely easy to use and offers hundreds of customizable settings. The platform has 3 tiers of plans with different themes and templates available to you depending with your preferred plan.

Does GoDaddy provide any kind of money back guarantee?

GoDaddy offers a limited 45-day money back guarantee; however, please note that this offer does not apply to all products and service. It's necessary to read the fine print carefully if you’re concerned about getting your money refunded back.

What is GoDaddy’s uptime guarantee?

GoDaddy offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee which adds up to 8.76 hours of downtime per year. If they fail to keep up with their service uptime guarantee in a particular month, you can contact them and request for 5% credit of your monthly hosting fee. However, be sure to check out their terms of service to be on sure that you’re within your right to request this credit.

What are the best GoDaddy alternatives?

GoDaddy is without a doubt one of the best low-budgets web-hosting companies, but if you feel the need to upgrade, shop around or compare web hosts. You can try a few other popular hosting alternatives including BlueHost, Site Ground, InMotion Hosting, and A2 Hosting.

If you own a WordPress site, a key Godaddy alternative worth considering is WP Engine hosting which offers managed platform for WordPress sites. While the managed hosting services from this company won’t come cheap, WP Engine is reputable for its exceptional capacity in this area of specialization.

On the other hand, if you’re not after a managed WordPress hosting option, you might consider HostGator and InMotion Hosting.

HostGator shares a lot of similarities with GoDaddy: however, the former uses the traditional cPanel while Godaddy uses its main control Panel. Just like GoDaddy, HostGator also offers commendable customer support.

InMotion Hosting is another web host that you can consider especially if you are looking for a firm that uses fast drives (SSDs) and boasts excellent customer support.