GoDaddy.com is world’s well known for domain registrar and web hosting. 1 out of every 20 websites is hosted on GoDaddy, they have approximately 78 millions domains registered, 19 million customers worldwide and have more than 9000 employees. It is a web hosting and domain name registrar titan.
Even a giant player in the internet industry has its benefit and flaw so let’s find out about things that you need to know before you sign up for its services.
Please note that GoDaddy price structure can be a little confusing.
GoDaddy Products
Domain Name Registrar: You can own almost any domain extension on Godaddy, the company is well known for being a registrar. Whenever I think of running a new website, GoDaddy is the first place for users to check out for a new domain name. It cost $11.99 for the first term and $17.99 after the first year. The renewal fee can be expensive, fortunately there is an alternative, see NameCheap.com if you want a lower fee for domain name.
Shared Hosting Plans begin at $8.99 to $24.99 a month. Best for small to medium size websites that do not need a high performance. This is the best option if you don’t need high traffic. The price isn’t cheap, you can check out ‘Interserver’ and ‘DreamHost’ that offer value prices with better performance for shared hosting.
WordPress Hosting Plans: WordPress has become a popular open-source content management system for running a website since the past decade. Many bloggers prefer to use WordPress platform because of its simplicity and manageable resources that optimize the hosting of wordpress exclusively.
VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting: Better than shared hosting, a small private server space with better performance is available for VPS users. The price begins at $30 a month. However, ‘A2 Hosting’ begins at $5 for a 20GB of space and 512 of RAM.
Dedicated Hosting: A user gets to run a website on a single server without sharing resources with other users. It is like renting the entire house for yourself. Unless VPS is not sufficient for your project, this is an upgraded option.A dedicated hosting with high performance comes with a great price, you need to pay $169.99 per month to host your website there. It is quite expensive, while ‘Interserver’ charges $50 a month.
Email Hosting Plans (add-on): If you have no website and need a professional email address under your property (ex. contact@yourwebsite.com), you can get this extra add-on for $4.99 a month with a 5GB of email storage space.
Website Builder Tool (extra): A very basic and simple builder designed for beginner with no tech-knowledge. There are a lot of missing ingredients and tools that make this builder seem to be shortlisted. I suggest you check out ‘DreamHost’ for a better tool if you need a website builder tool.
On top of the above, GoDaddy has side products like reseller programs, which allow you to resell the web hosting space to your clients without the GoDaddy branding, SEO consulting and web design service.
GoDaddy Pricing Table
| Economy | Deluxe | Ultimate | Maximum | |
| Website | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| CPU/RAM | 1/512 | 1/512 | 2/1 | 2/2 |
| Storage | 100GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Database | 10/1GB | 25/1BG | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Emails Acc. | 100 | 500 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| 1st Term Price | $6.99/m | $9.99/m | $14.99/m | $22.99/m |
| Renewal Price | $8.99/m | $11.99/m | $16.99/m | $24.99/m |
Economy Plan: A user can host 1 website only, less than 100GB storage space and 10 databases. This plan doesn’t include SSL certification. ‘NameCheap.com’ is the cheapest shared web hosting plan that allows 3 websites.
Deluxe Tier: Same as Economy Plan, except you can host unlimited websites and get 25 databases.
Ultimate Plan: An upgrade from Deluxe Tier, it comes with higher performance (e.g. 2CPUs and 1GB of memory) which also include unlimited use of databases and free SSL certification for the first year.
Maximum Tier: A user gets all of the above mentioned. The only upgrade is the 2GB of memory.
Compared with other web hosting companies, GoDaddy lacks crucial ingredients in their basic shared hosting plans. It doesn’t include website backups and will cost you an addition of $3 a month with a 5GB storage space. Also SSL certification is not included for basic plans you need to pay an extra $7 a month to get one, while other companies like ‘Interserver’ are offering SSL (Let’s Encrypt certificates!) for free.
If you sign up for the Economy Plan and require a backup system and SSL certification, the price will bump up to $17.50 from $7.99 a month. You can find a better economy shared hosting website elsewhere.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Simple Interface & Ease Of Use: Great for beginner
- Solid Speed & Up-Time Rate: High performance server
- Windows-Based Hosting
- High Storage Space: Maximum 250,000 inodes of total files
- Unmetered Bandwidth
Cons
- Expensive Hosting Plan: The cheapest plan when adding the extra add-ons like SSL cert and backups will make it more expensive.
- No Website Backups System: Need to purchase the add-on separately
- No SSL given: Most web hosting is providing this for free but GoDaddy charges you for using it. It is mandatory for every website to have SSL nowadays to do well on Google.com..
- No ‘Git-repository’ and ‘Staging areas’ which are handy tools for web developer
- No Migration Service: GoDaddy doesn’t help you to move your website from another web hosting company.
GoDaddy is recommended if:
You need a lot of storage space, unmetered bandwidth, great uptime and speed rate. Great for large businesses and professional bloggers with peak traffic and require to use a lot of server resources. But great resources come with a high price tag.
GoDaddy is Not recommended if:
You are on a budget, looking for a decent web hosting and want to spend less on it. A good and affordable web hosting can be found at ‘DreamHost’, ‘A2 Hosting’ and ‘Interserver’.
dbe5e9You are looking for a top-performer web hosting, but GoDaddy is a decent performer. You should check out ‘SiteGround’ and ‘DreamHost’ as an alternative.
If you are a web developer. Important elements such as Git-repositories and staging areas and CMS (wordpress) optimization options are not available.
If you need a backups system for your website.
Summary
After the review as above, should you use GoDaddy.com to host your website. Answer is yes, if you have the budget, you are tech-savvy and need a decent web hosting storage space. However it isn’t perfect and comes with a lot of missing elements like backups, SSL, and more.
GoDaddy web hosting high speed and up-time do put the company in a top position as a decent performer. They are companies of a few that offer windows-based hosting while many do not.
A Great place for beginners without technical knowledge but with a high budget to get a simple website running with ease. The control management interface is simple and easy to use.
Web programmer will find it disappointed for not include advanced tools like Git-repositories and staging areas. There is an alternative web hosting that includes these advanced features like ‘SiteGround’.
GoDaddy.com isn’t our choice for web hosting but can be a great option for you if the missing elements are not a requirement to run your website. You can try it out for 30 days without risk. Good luck!